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Naturalcultural Wonders to Anthropocene Disasters: A Bibliography for Possibility Aesthetics

“Artificial” derives from Latin: artificialis, “of, or belonging to, art.” Language is one of many ways that the long-standing opposition between art and nature in Western thinking manifests. It is part of an abiding assumption about how we distinguish the cultural, as a human domain, from the nonhuman matrix of material—the natural world, a physical backdrop for human autonomy and agency. However, humanity is now the predominant biogeochemical force on the planet. Whether viewed through the lens of global warming, the rates of carbon and nitrogen cycling, or the demise of innumerable species—by almost any measure, our artificialis has now become Earth’s second nature. Scientists have proposed the “Anthropocene” as a novel geological epoch to mark these dramatic changes, as a designation for how human ingenuity generally—and the logic of extractive capitalism specifically—has transformed the face of the planet. If Earth is a collective lifescape, then the question is how we will contribute to its resilience or to its decay, and what kinds of imaginaries will function as mediums for either path. Alas, art can no longer presume the privilege of humanistic neutrality (as if it ever really could). Representations of the human and nonhuman across art, design, and literature are nothing less than forms of possibility aesthetics. These aesthetics, as models, implicitly take a position on the shape of a future in which cultural and planetary histories have now irrevocably woven into one another. I would argue that the proposal for a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, urges an expansive recalibration of our scales of perception: from single lifetimes to multigenerational deep time, from human autonomy to creaturely mutuality, from inertness of substance to the vibrancy of matter. Put in the context of geological time, our human-scale notions of past, present, and future blur into a shared continuum in which science fiction and u/dystopian thinking begins to make its way into everyday life. “How did we get here?” and “where we going?” form a common query that, in turn, forces fresh scrutiny on precisely who the collective “we” even is, or could be. Which we is responsible, or most at risk? What sorts of people, organisms, and entities does we invite or exclude? In the age of climate change, reimagining Earth’s econoecology is an exercise in how the aesthetics of possibility can propose something less simplistic than the “natural” or the “artificial,” and more sustainable than business as usual. The works in this bibliography are intended to expand these spaces of aesthetic consideration. Many of the entries are not typical bedfellows, which may be a fitting model for the Anthropocene: a wonder-filling and terrifying assemblage in need of new sense. Likewise, few of the listed works are specifically about the Anthropocene. Although there are a number of excellent books specifically on “art and the Anthropocene,” my primary goal is to highlight varied formats and sources (speculative histories, manifestos, performative lectures, graphic novels) that take shape as a transdisciplinary cluster, a sampling that avoids tidy packaging in favor of a prismatic scattering of shared concerns. I hope that where the works diverge, they also reconverge—not only as opportunities for perceiving the complexity of planet-size facts, but also as spaces for imagining newly shaped fictions.