COPING WITH ECO-MELANCHOLIA THROUGH CREATIVITY AND COMMUNITY

Climate change presents a colossal challenge, impacting individuals either through distress and eco-melancholia or pushing them to disengage and avoid the issue altogether. Despite a prevalent concern for the environment among Missoulians, the overwhelming enormity of climate change's ramifications can make it challenging to navigate emotions without succumbing to despair. In response, I will host a series of three creative writing workshops aimed at helping people process their feelings about climate change and promoting hope for the future. By providing participants with relevant information and engaging writing prompts, the workshops will foster communal exploration of eco-melancholia, encouraging individuals to envision ways for humanity to thrive amid our shifting reality. Specifically, I intend to share information regarding the Anthropocene, concepts of wildness, and ethical issues in relation to climate change. The workshops will each be centered around a theme which represents an emotional response to the realities of this crisis: Despair, Rage, and Hope. By moving through these responses in this order, I hope to inspire participants to process the information presented to them in a way that inspires social and political action in support of sustainability and green initiatives. Through this shared space for emotional processing and artistic expression, the goal is to empower participants to use both their art and the knowledge gained through these workshops as a force for positive change and hope.

Background Context and Plan

  • Climate Change Art
    • Environmentally focused artists often aim to raise awareness about environmental issues. They use their works to communicate the urgency of addressing climate change and its consequences.
    • Many artists dealing with themes surrounding the Anthropocene employ interdisciplinary approaches, combining elements of science, technology, and various artistic mediums to create impactful and thought-provoking pieces.
    • Environmental artists also may engage in documenting and bearing witness to ecological changes, capturing the transformation of landscapes, the effects of pollution, or the struggles of endangered species. This documentation serves both as a record and a call to action.
    • Some artists who work with environmental themes explore speculative futures, imagining the potential consequences of continued environmental degradation.
  •  For this project, I hope to encourage workshop participants to engage with these aspects of Anthropocene-focused art while also working collaboratively to process the inherent grief and horror of environmental decay, fostering a sense of collective responsibility and resilience.

Workshop Curriculum

  • Environmental Rage Workshop
    • Topics covered
      • Concept of the Anthropocene
      • Wilderness as defined by the Wilderness Act of 1964
      • Climate change represented in visual art
        • Glacier photography
        • Edward Burtynsky photography
    • Craft skills
      • Imagery 
      • Descriptive language
      • Setting
    • Writing Prompts
      • Reflect on how changes in/degradation of landscapes inform us on concepts of wilderness and humans’ relationship to the environment.
      • Find original language to describe the landscapes depicted in visual Anthropocene art.
  • Environmental Despair Workshop
    • Topics covered
      • Ecofeminism
        • Anti-dualism
        • Care Ethics
        • Situated epistemology
    • Craft skills
      • Dialogue
      • Character development
    • Discussion questions
      • Which appeals to your instincts about humanity and nature more, dualism or anti-dualism?
      • As writers, how does your perspective on humanity’s relationship with the environment inform your characters and their relationships?
      • How does adopting an ethic of care impact our duties to the environment? To each other?
      • Can aspects of the environment function as characters in your writing?
    • Writing prompts
      • Write a character sketch that takes into account how this character’s relationship to their environment impacts their goals, values, and actions.
      • Write a conversation between two humans regarding an aspect of their environment. Think about the cadence of casual conversation. What is implied by what these characters leave unsaid?
      • Write a conversation between a human and a non-human character. Illuminate points of interconnection between them. Or, illuminate the way their differing perspectives/worldviews lead to a lack of common ground.
  • Environmental Hope Workshop
    • Topics covered
      • Tangible impacts of climate change
      • Ecomodernism
        • Solar Radiation Management and Carbon Capture
      • Utopia, dystopia, and Margaret Atwood’s “ustopia”
    • Craft skills
      • Worldbuilding
      • Plot structure
    • Discussion questions
      • Should we be investing in geoengineering research and practices? Are the risks worth the potential rewards?
      • What concerns or excites you about geoengineering?
      • Are there aspects of modern society that feel either utopian or dystopian to you?
    • Writing prompts
      • Describe either a real place or an imagined future world in a way that highlights utopian elements, dystopian elements, or both.
        • You can also draw a map of this world if you don’t feel like writing.
      • Describe how the environment influences aspects of your culture, politics, values, etc.
      • Write a scene in which a character gains new information about their world that challenges their preconceived notions about their society.

Notable Work Produced

  • In the initial workshop focusing on setting and descriptive language, a teenager crafted a vignette portraying a forest fire ignited by human negligence (i.e. firecrackers gone wrong at a gender reveal party), woven in the style of a horror narrative. They skillfully depicted the delicate balance between beauty and terror.
  • Following our character development and dialogue session, a participant wrote an imagined dialogue between himself and a hawk frequenting his backyard, occasionally preying on the birds he feeds. This dialogue led to a mutual understanding between him and the hawk, avoiding excessive anthropomorphism and tenderly exploring the predator-prey dynamic in ecosystems.
  • During our discussion on plot structure and worldbuilding in the third workshop, a participant outlined a story featuring giant mushrooms as carbon capture devices in a speculative utopian society. The protagonist's journey, enhanced by psilocybin-induced communication with the mushrooms, unveils the unseen suffering of the fungi, culminating in a compelling revolt against the fossil fuel industry.

Theoretical Applications

  • Topics in Value Theory

    • In conversation with the ethical theories proposed by Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, Topics in Value Theory explored the ways that attention impacts and informs the internal moral lives of humans. In particular, we investigated cognitive penetration, ideological mercy, and detached/ironic gazes as opposed to attentive gazes. This exploration is valuable in understanding morality and environmentalism because attention is a valuable resource. In contemporary times, attention is bought and sold as a commodity through advertising and social media algorithms designed to be addictive. This degrades the quality of our attention and discourages people from actively attending to the world with what Murdoch refers to as a “just and loving gaze” (Murdoch, 1964). With this phrase, Murdoch is referring to attending to an object in a way that is at once rational as well as caring and fair. Understanding the commodification of our attention allows us to examine the quality of our attention and the ways we are influenced by the particular objects to which we attend. In his book The Attention Merchants, Timothy Wu writes, “[H]ow we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine [our] lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about” (Wu, 2017, 7). Additionally, noticing how our attention impacts our perception of other people and things allows us to identify the operations through which we form and dispel biases. This is to say, the objects on which we cast our attention and the quality of that attention significantly affects the way we construct our worldviews and the process of our moral decision making.

      Studying attention gives us a lens to understand the ways we form our perceptions and how we make moral decisions, so it is important that we are able to identify the quality of attention that we devote to any particular object. First, we have to be aware of cognitive penetration which refers to the way one’s personality, mental states, or history influences their perceptions. This can include character traits, beliefs, knowledge, or moods. These things can either inform our perspective or cloud it. Due to the risk of cognitive penetration clouding or distorting our perspective, some philosophers (most notably, Simone Weil) advocate for de-creation or unselfing, which means that moral agents ought to seek to eradicate the self from their perceptions. In her essay “The Ethics of Attention”, Silvia Caprioglio Panizza refers to this as the Radical View (RV) of attention. Panizza quotes Weil in saying “I do not in the least wish that this created world should fade from my view, but that it should no longer be to me personally that it shows itself (Panizza, 2022, 91).” This illuminates the idea that within the RV model of attention, the particulars of the individual viewer should be negated in order for the viewer to form perceptions free of bias. On the other hand, Panizza reads Iris Murdoch as arguing for a Tame View (TV) of attention in which instead of seeking to totally rid the viewer of their individuality, the viewer ought to instead suppress aspects of themselves that may cloud their perception: selfishness, insecurity, ego, etc. Murdoch famously uses the example of a mother-in-law (M) and daughter-in-law (D) to demonstrate this concept. M, at first, views D as immature, ditzy, and lacking in depth due to M’s own biases. With time, however, M is able to repress her biases, and through a more just and loving gaze, M recognizes that the qualities in D that she had previously seen as unappealing actually make D youthful, exuberant, and kind. Analyzing these perspectives gives us an opportunity to explore different approaches to how we ought to form and direct our attention in order to receive clarity in our vision of the world around us.

      This understanding is especially valuable when examining biases regarding political or interpersonal issues. Our world is plagued by toxic discourse surrounding polarizing political issues, and this, of course, extends to environmental discourse. To better communicate concerns regarding these issues and possibly agree on solutions, it is important to understand how and why these conversations go awry. Sociologist Elizabeth Anderdson describes the means by which our communication breaks down. She uses first-order and second-order moral concerns to do this; we can think of first-order concerns as issues involving specific actions and second-order as an assessment of the involved person’s character or worth. So, when we conflate the harm caused by a specific action to the hierarchical status of the people who support or partake in it, second-order concerns are derailing first-order concerns. Consider common debates between ranchers and environmentalists: an environmental activist states, point blank, that ranching is contributing to climate change. A rancher may, understandably, interpret the environmentalist as saying that the rancher is an immoral or uncaring person due to their profession. This would shut down conversations about how we might make ranching more sustainable because the rancher feels that they are being personally attacked. Anderson presents several strategies to remedy this. 

      In particular, Anderson cites Professor Robin Dembroff’s idea of ‘ideological mercy’ (Dembroff, 2019). A person practices ideological mercy when they charitably understand others’ opinions within the wider contexts of their lives. They ask, ‘Why does this opinion make sense to them?’ This contextual question is an act of mercy by refusing the all-to-common explanatory judgment that people have bad opinions because they are bad people. Anderson writes, “From their point of view, their beliefs make sense and are what any decent person would affirm. Particularly if they were brought up in an insular community, they may never have encountered evidence or arguments that might call their views into question (Anderson, 2022, 84).” This requires a great deal of nuance and empathy, but it paves the way for productive conversations with people whose perspective differs from our own.

      Additionally, it is important to understand how and why a lack of empathy develops in the way that humans construct their perspectives. In another work, Panizza discusses a photograph taken at the annual Lychee and Dog Meat Festival in China. In the photo,  a woman clings to and clearly grieves a dog being taken to slaughter while onlookers appear to find this amusing. Panizza describes the woman’s gaze as attentive, whereas the onlookers are engaging in an ironic, detached gaze. Panizza writes, “[Irony’s] key elements are judgments of incongruity or tension…and detachment or lack of commitment to the object of the gaze” (Panizza, 2022, 43). She is stating that an attitude of ironic detachment involves a level of cognitive bias regarding the reality of the object of attention that leads to a lack of consideration toward that object. Panizza offers two explanations for this ironic, detached gaze; perhaps it’s guilt, perhaps vulnerability. She says, “It may be avoiding guilt…an avoidance that is especially important for self-preservation,” and “It may be the avoidance of the individual vulnerability that one feels when fully engaging with the gaze of another (Panizza, 2022, 45).” This relates back to Anderson’s analysis of first- and second-order moral concerns. Panizza is stating that a lack of empathy in the way we cultivate our perspectives is motivated by self-protection. Therefore, in order to engage with the world through a just and loving gaze, we ought to learn to suppress our selfishness and other undesirable traits which is what Panizza argues the Murdoch supported in her previously discussed article.

      The ethics of attention provided a lens for more effectively presenting philosophy. I was cognizant of the way our conversations surrounding polarizing topics such as the environment can lead to self-protective disengagement which often stems from cognitive penetration, so I was sure to be aware of how various life experiences might alter a person’s opinions on climate change. Therefore, I sought to practice ideological mercy and present these issues with an empathetic awareness of their nuances. Additionally, because I understood through this class the ways in which our attention is commodified, I tried to thoughtfully lead discussions on environmental issues in a way that made them worthy of an attentive gaze rather than an ironic/detached gaze. By encouraging participants to engage with environmental issues through creativity and emotional responses, we were able to have productive, nuanced conversations, and they were able to produce writing that revealed an attentive gaze being cast on the environment.

  • Environmental Philosophy

    • Environmental philosophy is a broad field of study that encompasses many smaller and more specific philosophical inquiries or questions. It gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s alongside increasing public concern over the state of the environment and the rise of environmental activism. There were many important figures in environmentalism before this point, such as John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps the most traditionally philosophical early work was Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949). Leopold’s “Land Ethic” advocated for taking into consideration our moral obligations to the environment through emphasizing the interconnectedness and continuance of ecosystems. Before this, Western philosophy was largely anthropocentric, or primarily concerned with human affairs. By asserting that the environment itself is something worth moral consideration, Leopold opened the door to a plethora of new philosophical concerns. I outline the development and central questions of Environmental philosophy as an academic field. The largest questions of environmental philosophy are not esoteric or academic. They are practical questions, questions we all face. Here, and in my CEP writing workshops, I introduce the story of environmental philosophy as it unfolds through the expansion of moral consideration, the study of intrinsic value, and care ethics.

      Early environmental philosophers, such as Arne Naess and Richard Sylvan, were interested in the value of biodiversity, stewardship, and intrinsic value in nature. Naess was instrumental in the rise of the Deep Ecology movement, which advocated for an ecocentric rather than anthropocentric approach to ethics. The Deep Ecologists certainly argued that nature should be valued in itself, but they also wanted to draw attention to the nature of human relationship with nature. They took something like Leopold’s insistence on interconnectedness and community and went deeper with it. Perhaps the real lesson of ecology, Naess argues, is that relations and community are even more primary than individuals, or that individuals can’t be properly understood apart from their ecological relationships. In a 1973 manifesto for the movement, Naess defined the core beliefs of Deep Ecology as follows: 

      Rejection of the man-in-environment image in favour of the relational, total-field image. Organisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations. An intrinsic relation between two things A and B is such that the relation belongs to the definitions or basic constitutions of A and B, so that without the relation, A and B are no longer the same things. The total-field model dissolves not only the man-in-environment concept, but every compact thing-in-milieu concept — except when talking at a superficial or preliminary level of communication (Naess, 1973, 95).

      Naess was suggesting that due to the interconnectedness of the biosphere, an anthropocentric ethic was misguided. Instead, he argued for biospherical egalitarianism which would mean that we place equal consideration on the implications of the environment when making moral decisions.

      Sylvan argued that the environment possessed intrinsic value as well as instrumental value, and he sought to show that humans have an instinct for seeing this. To do this, he posed The Last Man thought experiment, as follows: 

      The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to basic chauvinism, but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be committed to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly (the reason being perhaps that radical thinking and values have shifted in an environmental direction in advance of corresponding shifts in the formulation of fundamental evaluative principles) (Sylvan, 1973, 5).

      This demonstrates that even without complicated philosophical grounding, people have an intuition that there is value in the environment beyond what it can do for humans. With the world of humans having already collapsed in this example, the Last Man does no harm to other humans by depriving them of resources or recreation when he destroys all that he finds. However, most people, as Sylvan points out, would instinctively find the Last Man’s actions wrong. This reaction reveals that there is something intrinsically valuable in the environment, and therefore, it is worthy of moral consideration.  

      While Sylvan argued for the need for an ethics centered on intrinsic value, Holmes Rolston III, who was working at the same time as Sylvan, worked to provide this type of ethic. He sought to ground this intrinsic value in the continuance of the ecosystem that resulted from beings fulfilling their biological potential within their niches. In his article, “Challenges in Environmental Ethics,” he writes, 

      An organism is a spontaneous, self-maintaining system, sustaining and reproducing itself, executing its program, making a way through the world, checking against performance by means of responsive capacities with which to measure success. It can reckon with vicissitudes, opportunities, and adversities that the world presents. Something more than physical causes, even when less than sentience, is operating within every organism. There is information superintending the causes; without it the organism would collapse into a sand heap. This information is a modern equivalent of what Aristotle called formal and final causes; it gives the organism a telos, ‘end,’ a kind of (nonfelt) goal. Organisms have ends, although not always ends-in-view (Rolston, 1993, 130). 

      Rolston was pointing out that every organism within the environment, whether sentience can be attributed to them or not, has an “end” or goal based on their DNA and evolutionary potential. This suggests that all organisms have interests of a sort; while not all are necessarily able to experience pain or pleasure, all lifeforms have a predetermined interest in growing, thriving, and reproducing. Tying the idea of intrinsic value to the evolutionary story of life in this manner served to legitimize the idea that the environment ought to be afforded moral consideration. This was no longer simply based on intuition or ideas of interconnection within the ecosystem; Rolston proposed that it is based on evolutionary potential.

      After environmental ethics gained traction in academic spaces through discussions of intrinsic value, many other subjects came to the forefront of environmental thought. These included discussions of environmental aesthetics, environmental justice, and, most notably for this project, ecofeminism. Ecofeminists sought to illuminate connections between the objectification and domination of women/other human Others and the objectification and domination of the environment. These connections included, “historical (typically causal), conceptual, empirical, socioeconomic, linguistic, symbolic and literary, spiritual and religious, epistemological, political, and ethical interconnections” (Warren, 2000, 21). Most notable for my CEP project are the epistemological connections. Ecofeminist epistemologists “argue that only by listening to the perspectives of ‘those at the bottom of social hierarchies’ can one begin to see alternative ways of viewing an environmental problem, analyzing data, or theorizing about women-other human Others-nature interconnections” (Warren, 2000, 33-34). From this understanding, the idea of situated epistemology was born. Ecofeminism, drawing from feminist epistemology, highlighted the significance of women's unique connections to the environment. This perspective is crucial for (1) grasping the complete reality of our environmental circumstances and (2) comprehending the interconnected nature of various forms of oppression, including those affecting women, marginalized communities, animals, and the broader non-human world.

      Ecofeminists also sought to deconstruct the hierarchical, dualistic thinking that is prevalent in Western thought. They argue that historically, Westerners have thought in terms of binaries: man/woman, human/nature, reason/emotion, etc. Within these binaries is an inherent hierarchy in which one half of the dichotomy is assumed to be inherently superior to or dominant over the other. In response, ecofeminists suggest that these dualisms are a fallacy. Gender is a spectrum, reliant more on socialization than biological determinism. Humans are a part of the environment rather than separate from it. 

      Another common addition to the Ecofeminist movement has been a focus on Care Ethics. Care ethics is an ethical framework that emphasizes the importance of relationships, empathy, care, and love in moral decision-making instead of solely prioritizing reason. It takes into account the interconnectedness of individuals and the ways in which our actions and decisions affect others within our social and relational networks. Because of this, care ethics accepts emotional responses such as love as valid motivations for moral action, instead of prioritizing rationality over emotion. This framework also acknowledges that context is always important to moral decision-making. Relationships and specific circumstances are often more illuminating as to what is morally good in a given situation than principles or universal laws. 

      For my CEP project, I provided a brief presentation on environmental philosophy ideas at the beginning of each writing group. For the first one, I dedicated a portion of the presentation to intrinsic value, and my participants were prompted to work on setting and descriptive language in a way that highlighted value in the environment that was separate from human use. For the second workshop, we discussed ecofeminism, care ethics, and situated epistemology as a means of learning how to develop characters. The writers were asked to seek to understand a character through their relationships and contextual experiences. Environmental philosophy provided a foundation for environmental storytelling, and this allowed participants to process their eco-melancholia through creative work. 

  • Issues in the Anthropocene

    • Issues in the Anthropocene covered topics that have arisen in environmental philosophy as a result of climate change and living in the “Age of Man.” The term Anthropocene refers to the previously proposed geologic epoch that some scholars argued we are currently living in (Ellis, 2024). It was said to be distinct from the Holocene because everything on earth has been impacted by humans; even the most remote mountain top that no human has ever set foot on has been impacted by pollution and novel weather patterns caused by climate change. On March 4, 2024, the Anthropocene was denied an official geological designation by the Subcommittee on Quaternary Stratigraphy. This decision was largely made because they didn’t feel that there was conclusive enough evidence for an official date when the Holocene ended and the Anthropocene began (Ellis, 2024). Regardless, the concept of the Anthropocene gives us a valuable lens to understand human impact on the environment. Stating that human activity has impacted every facet of the environment challenges conventional Western notions of nature. This acknowledgment opens avenues to explore the ethical considerations surrounding potential solutions to climate change.

      From that foundation, this class explored post-natural philosophy through the work of Steven Vogel. Post-natural philosophy examines the implications of human intervention and manipulation of nature. It addresses the ways in which human activities, such as geoengineering, have altered and continue to alter the natural world. In his book Thinking Like a Mall, Vogel seeks to challenge traditional concepts of “nature” in order to unearth more clarity in environmental ethics in the wake of the Anthropocene. He outlines three problems with the idea of “nature”: 1) “nature has already ended” (Vogel, 2015, 25) meaning that the concept of nature as something separate from and untouched by humans isn’t materially accessible because; 2) “human beings have already transformed the world they encounter” (25), so by virtue of existing, humans have always already shaped the world they live in, so there isn’t an observable reason to refer to a realm separate from humans, and; 3) “the concept of ‘nature’ might be such an ambiguous and problematic one, so prone to misunderstanding and so riddled with pitfalls, that its usefulness for a coherent environmental philosophy turns out to be small indeed” (25). If these points are true, it would appear that the concept of “nature” offers little normative guidance to the practice of environmental ethics. Because of this, Vogel suggests that we do away with the concept entirely. Instead, we should focus on the environment or “that which environs us” (58). He writes, “The environment is this world… a world that is built, and thus one that comes… already prestructured by previous human activity” (58). So, if the environment is constructed through our practices, and every interaction with it alters it, then we can assume that our moral obligation toward the environment is to be mindful of what we build. The ideas presented by Vogel open the door to discussing potential technological strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change. 

      Ecomodernists are a subgroup of environmentalists that are highly optimistic about technological solutions to climate change. This school of thought advocates for the use of technology and innovation to address environmental challenges while also promoting human well-being and economic development. It emerged as a response to traditional environmentalism, which often emphasizes limits to growth, sustainability, and traditional forms of conservation that seek to retain the primeval character of wild spaces. Ecomodernists, on the other hand, argue that technological progress, human ingenuity, and responsible management can enable a decoupling of human activities and economic growth from environmental degradation. This would include investing in nuclear energy and clean technologies to retain the creature comforts of contemporary life while also reducing not only environmental harm, but the human footprint entirely. The goal would be to decrease the amount of land and water influenced by people while still maintaining the same standard of living. To do this, ecomodernists promote urbanization and the intensification of agricultural and industrial activities (Asafu-Adaye et al., 2015). Ecomodernist Michelle Marvier expresses the optimism of this position when she writes, “Nature could be a garden -- not a carefully manicured and rigid one, but a tangle of species and wildness amidst lands used for food production, mineral extraction, and urban life” (Marvier, 2012). 

      While the ideas presented in ecomodernism are refreshingly optimistic and exciting at times, they also present a couple of problems. Namely, this requires a total divorce from humanity’s collective nostalgia for nature as it fully embraces the idea of a built environment. Perhaps more concerningly, these ideas are deeply embedded in capitalism, and they rely heavily on the assumed good intentions of venture capitalists and government entities. While this kind of technological optimism may seem appealing, it doesn’t account for the historic greed and short-sightedness of capitalist innovation that resulted in climate change in the first place.

      One of the biggest ideas proposed by many Ecomodernists is geoengineering which is a means of mitigating the impacts of climate change proposed by ecomodernists. This refers to deliberate, technological interventions in Earth's natural systems aimed at counteracting the impacts of climate change on a global scale. Geoengineering includes both Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). SRM techniques are designed to reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth's surface, thereby offsetting the warming effects of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. An example of this  is injecting reflective aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation away from the earth. This is problematic for a couple of justice-based reasons: “1) solar geoengineering would hurt the global poor disproportionately and 2) solar geoengineering would represent an abdication of historical responsibility on the global North” (Horton and Keith, 2016, 80). David Keith, founder of Carbon Engineering, a company devoted to developing carbon capture technology, clarifies the first of these concerns: “Geoengineering might worsen air pollution or damage the global ozone layer, and it will certainly exacerbate some climate changes, making some regions wetter or drier even as it cools the world” (Keith, 2021). The effects of climate change have already manifested most profoundly in the global South, and they have primarily impacting the global poor. SRM techniques have the potential to do the same. There is a sort of utilitarian calculus at play here. To what degree are we willing to harm current people for the sake of future generations? On the second point regarding responsibility for climate change, Keith writes, “The strongest opposition to geoengineering research stems from fear that the technology will be exploited by the powerful to maintain the status quo. Why cut emissions if we can seed the atmosphere with sulfur and keep the planet cool” (Keith, 2021)? SRM would function only as a Band-Aid. It would not address the root causes of climate change, and concerns that it would be used as an excuse to maintain the fossil fuel industry’s business-as-usual are not unfounded given the massive social and political backlash that has historically met any attempts to quell our carbon emissions.

      In light of these concerns about SRM, it may appear at first glance that CDR is a better alternative. CDR techniques aim to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is a major driver of climate change. These methods include afforestation and reforestation projects, direct air capture technologies, ocean fertilization, etc. However, CDR works cumulatively over time. To have an effect, we would need to invest in massive infrastructure now, and the benefits of it would not be apparent immediately (Keith, 2021). This is expensive and, if we don’t also massively cut carbon emissions, likely ineffective. These technological solutions proposed by ecomodernists undersell the large-scale social and industrial changes that would need to take place for them to be successful in the long-term.

      Through understanding our environment as something that is always being constructed, as Vogel suggests, we are able to move away from seeking normative moral guidance through the slippery, vague notion of “nature” and instead focus on mindfully building an environment that is sustainable. If we are (conceptually, if not officially) living in the Anthropocene, then our ethical obligations to both the ecosystem and to humanity are to construct a healthy, thriving world. 

      While proposed technological solutions are currently riddled with justice and efficacy concerns, exploring these topics in the writing workshops I conducted as part of CEP allowed my participants to engage in imaging potential future worlds. We discussed utopias and dystopias, and I encouraged them to construct ideas of the future through their creative work that was neither overly technologically optimistic, nor entirely fatalistic. Cultivating hope through creativity allowed them to meaningfully engage with the ethical concerns of the Anthropocene.

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