# 14
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 how humans 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 this change as beauty.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to see the world, 2016Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
What if everything is entangled
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Open air is the “breath” of the green earth. There is no opposition between the ethereal and the material, no sky above us toward which to ascend, but rather a we that is always already within a sky that is nothing other than living earth.
That is to say, a sky built by the metabolic activity of l …
What if everything is entangled
Learning to unsee what appears to be normal means learning to see entanglement.
We have learned to see weather as something given by nature, as forces beyond human determination. Weather seemed untouchable. But this perception hides the relations between our interventions and what we call “nature”—the human actions that have contributed to profound changes in weather.
To see these relations requires imagination, because the entanglement is largely invisible, and the conditions against which we could compare the present belong to a past we can no longer experience: stable weather conditions, predictable patterns of spring, summer, autumn and winter.
We cannot simply look back and see the climate we have lost. So the new instability becomes normal.
We have to imagine what has disappeared—and imagine the relations that made it possible.
