By Adriaan Lucassen
I wrote this for an earlier assignment in October; we had planned to use it for a podcast, but that did not come to fruition. I thought I could upload it here instead.
Perspective on the Anthropocene and how I experience it
I think I am the only one in the group that had not heard of the term Anthropocene prior to signing up for this course. This made me feel a bit silly and at first I struggled to understand what it entailed. It seemed a bit weird to me to, in a Humanities course, extensively discuss what is essentially (albeit controversially) a geological term. However, the readings and lectures have contributed to my understanding of both the term and its relevance in a range of disciplines other than geology. I have come to understand that its emergence can be felt in all sorts of ways.
I like to think in imagery and the image of the Anthropocene in Africa that comes to mind when I think of it first is of a riverside beach that I visited in Central Ghana which was full of litter and other garbage. I had enough imagination that I could see that it would be a pristine and beautiful place if it was not for all that rubbish obscuring our view. This, for me, exemplifies the Anthropocene and the Anthropocene in Africa: we have come to a point that humans have made their mark on the natural landscape in huge ways that are almost irreversible. Cleaning that beach would take months and it is not going to happen anyway because no one gets paid for it, and this is just one example of how such damage can be done.