Learning to unsee and see more

Today’s hurricanes, droughts, floods, record snowfalls, and escalating temperatures create a different feeling—a constant unease as unusual weather becomes the new normal. That unease chimes with the uncanny feeling produced by the new global city, digital networks, and drones. In order to have lived in a month where the world was not warming month by month, you need to have been born in 1985 or earlier. If you were born after 1985, you have never known what the pre-climate-changed world was like. Your body knows nonetheless that the drought, the floods, and the rising seas are out of joint with past experience. It just feels wrong. So, we have to imagine that past, “unsee” [...] how it has taught us to see the world, and begin to imagine a different way to be with what we used to call nature. That will be seeing the Anthropocene. 

The city has become the habitat for the majority and we have naturalized it in art,photography, and film. We can learn to look again at these works to see howhumans have changed the world, and then we could develop ways of seeing the planet that might be part of the solution. To do so, however, we have to“unsee” the ways in which we have come to see thischange as beauty.