This thesis, “Designing for Death in a Divided Future,” by Hillevi Hesseldahl, is a speculative design project which explores the ideological dichotomy in addressing climate crises within the Anthropocene epoch. The study highlights two major frameworks: Posthumanism together with Anthroposophy, advocating for a harmonious integration with nature, and Transhumanism together with Eco-Realism, emphasizing technological solutions and a geologial separation between human and wild ecosystems. The project uses speculative design to visualize future death rites, presenting two contrasting scenarios for Stockholm in 2050.  The first scenario, “Gaian Sympoiesis,” envisions a society deeply connected with nature, employing local, community-based solutions. Here, death rites involve the “Vessel of Return,” an urn designed to return human essence to the earth, symbolizing a cyclical view of life.  The second scenario, “Cybernetic Ascendancy,” portrays a technologically advanced society where humans withdraw from nature, relying on digital innovation and conservation of natural habitats. This scenario introduces the “Orb of Descendancy,” a digital artifact encapsulating a deceased person’s life data, reflecting a rational, data-driven approach to memorialization.  By examining these speculative futures, the thesis sheds light on current ideological divides and the potential impacts of our choices on the trajectory of human civilization. This project combines artistic methods, personal interviews, and design theories to create tangible representations of possible futures, aiming to foster a deeper understanding of the present and stimulate discourse on navigating the Anthropocene.

As protected spaces for nature are becoming a key global policy for preserving biodiversity for the future, this thesis uses a novel theoretical approach to propose a multispecies history of conservation that re-evaluates their origins. I selected the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust’s reserve at Slimbridge, in Gloucester, England as my case study to demonstrate this. Slimbridge is well suited because of its early origins (1946 – present day) and strong archival record. The trust published annual reports every year from 1946 and these large documents containscientific reports, anecdotal observations, and administrative decision-making processes that are an untapped resource for writing histories of the development of conservation spaces. Looking for moments of tension between known and unknown nature, charismatic and mundane animal experiences, and the construction of multispecies political orderings within the reports drew my analysis towards a narrative around these zones that blends environmental history writing with theoretical analysis. Slimbridge is re-situated through this work as a complex process of creating, sustaining, and reproducing new relationships between the trust, semi-tame animals, and wild birds that came to constitute what I describe as a conservation space. Crucially, it is the relationships that conservation builds that it reproduces and protects, so we should think of conservation as a way to build new, more resilient, and just ecologies.

This essay explores the dynamic landscape of Anthropocene fiction, using novels such as John Lanchester’s The Wall and Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City as lenses through which to explore the aftermath of climate change. Both narratives tackle the question: what unfolds in the wake of environmental disaster? Focused on the consequences of flooding, these novels depict worlds grappling with diminishing resources and an acute scarcity of habitable land, intensifying the challenges of overpopulation. In response, the remaining governments resort to authoritarian measures, fostering oppression and control. This exploration unfolds through the lens of four primary Anthropocene themes: climate change, overpopulation, authoritarianism, and rebellion. By examining how these novels navigate these themes, the essay contributes to the emerging field of Anthropocene fiction. Moreover, it highlights the urgent need for addressing climate change while underscoring the social justice implications embedded in these narratives. John Lanchester’s The Wall and Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City serve as vital contributors to this literary landscape, shedding light on the intricate interplay between humanity and the environment in the face of Anthropocene challenges.

This essay explores the different levels of scale used in Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory. The central thesis of this essay, “The Novel on a New Scale: Considering the World in a Tree’s Lifetime,” examines the different levels of scale, from the general concept to the particular scale of the novel as a medium, as well as the spatial and temporal scales of human and non-human entities in The Overstory. This exploration unfolds through four sections, each with its own sub-sections: Scale, History to Fiction, The Character and the Decentering of the Human, and the Temporal Scale.            By examining how The Overstory tackles the challenges of operating on multiple scales to provide an authentic narrative, this essay contributes to the emerging field of Anthropocene fiction. It further emphasizes the need to acknowledge multiple scales both as authors and readers, as they inherit the power to shift perspectives. Richard Powers is a novelist who successfully brings the natural world closer to his readers while truthfully addressing the critical issues of climate change and deforestation.

The Arctic—warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet—is a source of striking imagery of amplified environmental change in our time, and has come to serve as a spatial setting for climate crisis discourse. The recent alterations in the Arctic environment have also been perceived by some observers as an opportunity to expand economic exploitation. Heightened geopolitical interest in the region and its resources, contradicted by calls for the protection of fragile Far North ecosystems, has rendered the Arctic an arena for negotiating human interactions with nature, and for reflecting upon the planetary risks and possibilities associated with the advent and expansion of the Anthropocene—the proposed new epoch in Earth history in which humankind is said to have gained geological agency and become the dominant force over the Earth system. With the Arctic serving as a nexus of crosscutting analytical themes spanning contemporary history (the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century until 2015), this dissertation examines defining characteristics of the Anthropocene and how the concept, which emerged from the Earth system science community, impacts ideas and assumptions in historiography, social sciences and the environmental humanities, including the fields of environmental history, crisis management and security studies, political geography, and science and technology studies (STS). The primary areas of empirical analysis and theoretical investigation encompass constructivist perspectives and temporal conceptions of environmental and climate crisis; the role of science and expertise in performing politics and shaping social discourse; the geopolitical significance of telecoupling—a concept that reflects the interconnectedness of the Anthropocene and supports stakeholder claims across wide spatial scales; and implications of the recent transformation in humankind’s long duration relationship with the natural world. Several dissertation themes were observed in practice at the international science community of Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard, where global change is made visible through a concentration of scientific activity. Ny-Ålesund is furthermore a place of geopolitics, where extra-regional states attempt to enhance their legitimacy as Arctic stakeholders through the performance of scientific research undertakings, participation in governance institutions, and by establishing a physical presence in the Far North. This dissertation concludes that this small and remote community represents an Anthropocene node of global environmental change, Earth system science, emergent global governance, geopolitics, and stakeholder construction in an increasingly telecoupled world.

<p>This dissertation is an attempt to explain art in the 21st century by an artist/researcher. It is a theoretical writing on art informed by current discourses that influence art such as science and technology. There are two goals of this project. The first one is to understand art’s cultural role in the age of the anthropocene. What is the anthropocene? How does art’s role in society change in this particular geological epoch (following Crutzen’s definition), compared to for instance Holocene? This brings us to the second goal of my project. To better understand art’s role in society, can we benefit from a theory of art, that could present an insight on the dynamics within an artistic experience? What are the current tools and tendencies that can help form such a theory of art? Which fields can contribute to such an understanding?</p><p>As an instance of artistic research practice which involves both academic research and art practice, I will be using art projects as case studies to reach these goals. Case studies will consist of my own projects as well as projects by other artists who had been working on similar topics such as Edward Burtynsky, Chris Jordan, Louis Bec, Trevor Paglen, Patricia Piccinini and Lynn Hershmann to name a few. From Timothy Morton to Mackenzie Wark to Donna Haraway cultural theorists of our time, highlight the fact that there is a need for a cultural theory that can attend to what we might call the anthropocene. What is the contribution of art for such a theory? Or can art be instrumental in building a cultural theory at all? My dissertation offers a multi-disciplinary argument for the need to address such questions . Starting from art’s roots in biology and extending to what we might call our biological imagination, the dissertation focuses on art’s connection to biology to initiate a formula for art in the age of the anthropocene.</p> / Dissertation

Environmental pressures such as natural disasters, resource scarcity, and conflict related to climate change have emphasized the importance of considering social justice within its ecological context. Gender inequality is one type of injustice that has traditionally been addressed as a social matter, yet gendered divisions in bargaining power, mobility, and access to resources are exacerbated by environmental instability. One barrier to gender equity in the face of a changing climate is the mainstream economic paradigm, which promotes growth and individualism, often at the cost of environmental and social wellbeing. The issue of gender inequality in the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch highlighting human impact of earth systems, is explored here in three parts. The first section identifies opportunities for feminist and ecological economics to assimilate notions of justice in mainstream economic thought. The second considers dynamics of gender equality through an econometric analysis of macroeconomic effects of traditionally female-dominated unpaid care work. Finally, the third part investigates national progress toward the maternal mortality reduction target set in the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals and proposes a gendered perspective for the newly implemented Sustainable Development Goals. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of policy implications for national and international development institutions as they seek to improve gender equity in diverse social and ecological contexts.

Novembre 1988, la création du GIEC médiatise, institutionnalise, légitimise l’idée d’une « crise environnementale » et se propose d’en prendre la mesure. Les années 1990 et 2000 sont ponctuées d’événements politiques souvent mondiaux, qui participent à faire, de ce que l’on appellera alors le développement durable, une question sociétale majeure. Comment ce récit sur l’écologie pénètre-t-il le milieu de l’architecture ? Quel champ lexical convoque-t-il ? Quels acteurs s’emparent-ils de ce sujet ? Quelles institutions portent ces thèmes et vers quelles directions ? Quelle influence a-t-il sur la production architecturale française ?L’ambition de cette recherche est de comprendre la généalogie du récit écologiste dans le milieu de l’architecture, des questions réglementaires et énergétiques des années 1990 au changement de paradigme qui s’opère à la fin des années 2000, notamment avec l’émergence de la thèse de l’anthropocène / November 1988 the establishment of the IPCC mediates, institutionalized, legitimized the idea of an "environmental crisis" and intends to take the measurement. The 1990s and 2000s are often punctuated by global political events, participating to do, what we then called sustainable development, a major societal issue. How he gets this story on ecology the architectural environment? What lexical field he summons? Which actors do they seize it? What institutions are these themes and to which directions? What influence he has on the French architectural?The aim of this research is to understand the genealogy of the environmental story in the architectural environment, regulatory and energy issues in the 1990s paradigm shift taking place in the late 2000s, especially with the emergence the thesis of the Anthropocene

The tension inherent in the Anthropocene is the tension between what is rendered (in)visible, and what attempts to be made visible. It is, in this sense, a conflict of ontology and aesthetics: ghosts flutter around us, in and out of our dimension (Bourriaud, 2016; Morton, 2013), and, as Poe would say, “man” is being driven mad by the heartbeats heard through the floorboards. This study addresses two main ideas: (a) that it is the modern subject that is the anthropos of the Anthropocene, and (b) that we must further conceptualise claims about the ‘end of the world’ (Morton, 2013). Ultimately, however, both these claims are intimately linked: the ‘subject’ and the ‘world’ in modernity cannot be separated from each other, and are indeed part of the same process (Mbembe, 2003). Thus, the central argument herein is that the Anthropocene should be viewed as a threshold (Clark, 2016; Haraway, 2015) to an epoch (namely, modernity) rather than the start of a new one. To this end, what is at its ‘end’ or threshold then, is the modern subject, and the ‘world’ that it inhabited. We are faced with the utter abyss of the negative (Sinnerbrink, 2016). The sixth extinction is imminent, and a whole host of morbid repercussions of making-world (Mbembe, 2003) are creeping towards us (Morton, 2013). Ultimately, we must reckon with absence. But what does this mean? How are we to perceive and think about this lack? This study aims to address this problem, arguing that we now face the presence of absence, rather than the absence of presence. Indeed, we must seek a new aesthetics of absence. / Graduate

L’érosion des sols est reconnue comme l’un des principaux facteurs à l’origine de la dégradation physico-chimique des environnements aquatiques. Ce phénomène, bien que largement décrit dans des régions topographiquement contrastées, reste, pour les régions de plaine agricole très peu détaillé en dépit d’une connectivité optimale entre les sources de matière et les masses d’eau. Dans ce contexte, nous avons développé une approche intégrée multi-paramètres permettant de retracer la cascade sédimentaire sur une plaine agricole drainée (bassin du Louroux : 47.16°N – 0.78°E) en partant des sources de matière jusqu’à leur accumulation dans un réceptacle sédimentaire, l’étang médiéval du Louroux. Dans les objectifs initiaux, il s’agissait (i) de quantifier à long (<60 ans) et court terme (<10 ans) l’évolution de la dynamique érosive en lien avec les perturbations anthropiques (remembrement, mise en place de réseaux de drainage, fossés), (ii) de tracer l’origine des sédiments transitant dans les cours d’eau (iii) et d’identifier les modali-tés de départs de la matière au niveau des berges. / Soil erosion is identified as one of the main factors influencing the physico-chemical degradation of the aquatic environments. This phenomenon has been largely described on contrasted topographic areas but there is a gap of knowledge about sediment mobilization/transfer in lowland areas despite the high connectivity level between the potential sources of sediment and the water bodies. In this context we have implemented an integrated multi-parameter approach allowing to track the sediment dynamics in a drained lowland area (the Louroux pond catchment: 47.16°N – 0.78°E) by starting from the sources of sediment to their accumulation in a sedimentary receptacle: the middle-age Louroux pond. The aims of this study are (i) to quantify at long (approx. 60 years) and short time scales (<10 years) the evolution of the erosion rate in the hillslope in link with the increase of the anthropogenic pressures (land consolidation, implementation of the drain network, ditches design), (ii) to track the origin of sediment reaching the pond, (iii) to identify and quantify the parameters influencing bank erosion, that is one of the main source of sediment transfers.