With Every Root That Have Seeped Through Concrete
– Sprouted Sequoiadendron Giganteum seed in reclaimed concrete block, app. 12” tall entirely as of January 2021, on going
© 2021 Chris Manfield

A Post-Anthropocene Manifesto
2020 - on going

The mass of human-made objects had exceeded the weight of the earth’s collective biomass in the year of 2020. The Anthropocene epoch is marked by the significance of human activities that have grown to affect the environment on a geological scale. As the earth’s climate began to change, we are faced with a global crisis. To mitigate the threat of this global catastrophe, we’ve adapted our ideas around environmentalism; a theory that essentialized the environment as a basis for our collective learning, growth, and survival — as an interdependent system of living and non-living entities. Since human beings have changed the climate, everything on earth has changed with it. Based on this idea, it can therefore be argued that we now live in a synthetic environment. The notion that the synthetic, human made environmental system is different from the natural environment suggests a separation between human beings and nature. The idea that human beings are separate and dominant to the natural world is a residue of colonial thinking. At the verge of a climate crisis, we understand that there is a need to resolve our thinking of the natural environment under the realization that we are part of the natural world.

The contemporary definition of nature does not rely entirely on the notion of the synthetic versus the natural. Nature is a continuous flow of ideal disposition. Within this understanding, we are beginning to reshape our understanding of environmentalism. The archaic understanding that the notion of environmental sustainability is applicable only to the “natural” environment will be challenged under the notion of the interweaving of the idea of the synthetic and the natural. The new understanding of environmentalism might rely more on the idea of harmony between transience and preservation, between conservation and progress. In order for us to strive for institutional sustainability, there needs to be reconciliation between the relationship of the institution and its environment.

Used in computer science since 1967 to denote n-dimensional non local entities, the term“hyperobject” is used by contemporary philosopher Timothy Morton to explain objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization such as climate change and Styrofoam. The idea of the hyperobject itself is a fragment from a bridge of understanding of the radical imagination of the relationship between human beings and their environment as a whole to explore the political implementation of postanthropocentric environmentalism. The artificial intelligence misnomer had suggested that machines share our capability to conceive and generate information and knowledge. Nonetheless, the paradox of ontological intelligence planted a clue that has radicalized the rethinking of agencies between ourselves and our environment. We are beginning to grapple with the idea of the decentralization of anthropocentric thinking as we scatter ourselves across the universe.

A passage, from a biblical reiteration of Mesopotamian records of the story of the tower of Babel reads “Let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves. Otherwise we will be scattered across the face of the earth.” When we understand institutionalization as a post colonial order, we can associate the hierarchy of our capitalist world to the tower of Babel. The re-imagination of this hierarchy at the forefront of an era of decolonization therefore can be reflected against political polarization within nation states across the globe — which can also be reflected against the Babylonian account of the scattering of language and people. When we engage ourselves in post-anthropocentric pedagogy, we are invited to picture a world that exists beyond the scope of historical sensibilities. To grapple with the potentiality of knowledge in an era that might exist without us. If perhaps there is some immaterial part of us that cannot disappear, this part of us is what links us to the afterlife. If there is something in our composition that prevails beyond a life lived between reincarnation of dust and stars, the insight of a universal flow between all that is eternal, gives us a sense of spirituality. Within the cavities of human knowledge, there lies a world of endless possibilities.