The current global climate and biodiversity crisis, while making us aware of the dramatic impact of anthropogenic action on ecosystems, has also questioned the ideals and concepts through which the non-human, living world has been interpreted, represented, and experienced since the early modern period. This is, many argue, the age of the Anthropocene, defined as a new geological epoch resulting from human agency that is characterized by rampant urbanization, intensive agriculture, large-scale extractivism, and destruction of ecosystems. These rapidly occurring transformations have led some to allude to the possible “end of nature” or “death of nature,” a conclusion that, as Michel Collot argues, can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, nature can be said to have vanished from our lives through a combination of human-induced change and estrangement: “[o]ur mostly urban lifestyles are distancing us from the natural environment in which humanity has lived for millennia; we now only have access to nature through the multiple instruments and mediations offered by an increasingly powerful technology that degrades and even risks destroying it.” On the other hand, it is the idea of nature itself as a distinct entity that may be aestheticized, transformed into a spectacle, that appears to no longer be valid. In this second sense, nature is understood as the product of epistemologies that contributed to intellectual and material control over life and matter by distinguishing between the human and the non-human, notably the modern European separation between nature and culture, identified as the “great separation” (“Grand Partage”) by Bruno Latour and Philippe Descola. New materialists like Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Tim Ingold, Donna Haraway, David Abram, or Timothy Morton emphasize the necessity to adopt less anthropocentric viewpoints. They argue that humans should become reconciled with the idea that they are interconnected and co-evolving within systems of beings and webs of life and that “human culture is inextricably enmeshed with vibrant, non-human agencies.” Such an acknowledgement would allow them to reconcile their current awareness of irreversible loss—of biodiversity, of the reserves of the earth—with a genuine endeavour to compose with ongoing, multispecies forms of becoming. In her discussion of the Chthulucene, which she defines as a new epoch in which humans evolve within the interconnected and dynamic webs of the Earth, Haraway suggests that “one way to live and die well” is to join forces with other living beings in order “to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and recomposition, which must include mourning irreversible losses.” These evolutions have significant implications for artistic practices and aesthetic experience, notably raising the question of the role artists play as we adjust to the perception of environmental collapse. They especially highlight the difficulty of creative and affective engagement with rapid anthropogenic transformations. Cultural actors may feel powerless to address ecological disasters over which they have little influence. In The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh asks whether “the currents of global warming” are “too wild to be navigated in the accustomed barques of narration,” suggesting that the climate crisis has led to an unprecedented representational crisis, eluding the literary conventions that had shaped the narrative imagination in previous centuries. What is more, the legitimacy and motivations of artistic practices and of the quest for an aesthetic appreciation of our transformed environments may be questioned, especially as a new emphasis is placed on decentering the human in the experience of the living world. The aesthetic and the creative are seen as forms that perpetrate distance from and control over the natural world. As Mark Cheetham suggests, such a stance could be understood as a form of involvement …
