Week 2: Practices for the Anthropocene

1)Responding to “Short Answers to Hard Questions About Climate Change”

One of the questions that surprised me the most is a question asking how much will the sea rise? The article talked about how the ocean has been rising a foot per century, and even though it already brought severe effects on our environment, governments as well as property owners, it would still be manageable if the rate continued. But I guess the real question is not how much, but how fast just like what the author has pointed out. I found the statistics are super shocking,”A recent study found that burning all the fossil fuels in the ground would fully melt the polar ice sheets, raising the sea level by more than 160 feet over an unknown period.” How much is 160 feet? I did a little calculation: the Chicago Water Tower is about 154 feet tall, so 160 feet is like one-and-one-tenth times as tall as The Chicago Water Tower. This fact is pretty scary to me. The author also informed us that even the emissions stopped immediately, some of the great cities will still eventually be flooded. Therefore, what we can do now, as an individual, and also as a group, is to try our best to limit our emissions to buy more time so we can come up with a better solution.

Another thing I learned through this short Q&A is one thing we all can do as an individual: to reduce meat in our diet. As populations grow, we are demanding more meat, and also as the fats economic development, more and more families have the ability to afford meat, thus, making the emission problem even worse. If we can’t completely cut out meat, we can at least eat less beef and eat more chicken instead.

I am definitely encouraged by this article as I learned about what we should do as an individual in order to help our living environment. But the power of an individual is super small, and I guess this is the reason why many people I know have the awareness of the problem but never even tried to make a change because they knew it is not going to make a big difference. Sometimes it is also hard for me to always keep in mind, for example, to bring my own bag to shopping, to not order beef, or to not but plastic water bottles.

2) a short description of the Anthropocene

Anthropocene is a term which describes a period of time from when human existed and their behaviors started to have a huge impact on global geology and also ecosystems, in short words, it is basically the age of human. It is period ibnlcudes things such as the rise of fossil fuels, urbanization of the huge populations, and the industrialization of agriculture, etc.

3) As we have discussed in the class, some of the skills and practices that might be useful for meeting the realities of the Great Acceleration and Anthropocene are the followings:

1.  bring your own shopping bags to shop
2. stop buying plastic water bottles
3. eat less meat and more veggies
4. buying less fast fashion items because they are noting to last long
5. riding bikes and walking are good exercise and also a way to help reduce gas emission
6. use less papers

As an artist/designer, the skill and practices I would like to develop is to know how to recreate what we already have into a new thing/art. In addition, especially as fashion designers, know how to make environmental friendly fabrics.

4)artist or designer that you admire who has made a practice of daily life into art or a creative process.

Artist: Sheila Nakitende

Waste paper/collage

 

Waste paper and bark cloth.

ARTIST STATEMENT