PHOTOGRAPHY: After dinner ©M_Collette on Agfa XRG200
We consume the Earth. Literally. Maybe that’s what this age is all about. And in fact, this is the most acceptable meaning of the word “Anthropocene”: the meal (cena) of humans (anthropoi), or at least some of them… The least acceptable meaning is indeed the prevailing one, which makes mankind – A.K.A. Sapiens – the cause of the current climatic and ecological upheavals, forgetting that the vast majority of human beings, especially indigenous peoples (but also to a large extent women), have never played more than a minor, and despised, role in this great story of man’s domination of nature.
And what is being devoured (or consumed) is the very world that supports and welcomes life. In other words, our own reservoir of possibilities for (well)being. But there’s not much new here. The contemporary era of ecological awareness is an epilogue to the great anthropocentric project, which is Western in origin and essence. In the end, the Earth breaks up into particles and whispers from its deep entrails: “This is my body. Take. Eat. And drop dead…”