Notations from the Edge of the Anthropocene
Valerie LeBlanc, May 17, 2025, adapted from a presentation by Zoom at the Conference: Mourning Arcadia: Afterlives of the Pastoral Elegy in the Literature and the Arts of the English-Speaking World. Université de Picardie – Jules Verne, Campus de la Citadelle, Amiens, France. March 13th-14th 2025.
This presentation is grounded in the belief that witnessing is a vital function of an artist. Co-existing with that belief are ecological concerns that are impossible to separate from day-to-day existence and the level of peace experienced in any timeline. As an active practitioner of the visual arts and writing, I have worked individually and collaboratively since the mid-1980s.
Throughout this time, I have combined creative genres with an experimental edge, often incorporating performance and videopoetry that blend text, image, and sound to create immersive experiences with ecological themes. For discussion material within this talk, I will present a selection of still photographs and videopoems; some represent collaborations with my partner Daniel H. Dugas.
The Language of Fossils[1]
Places that were once thought of as lonely and bare are now appreciated
for the possibilities of contemplation they provide.
Sometimes their attraction is the overall feeling rising up from a location.
At other times, we have to go back further than to the existing flora and fauna,
to the places where only rocks bear witness to the passage of time.
Whenever we wander in natural settings,
we are drawn to the rocks and the earth.
We try to resist the temptation,
but always find ourselves picking up stones to take a closer look.
When visiting coastal regions, the changes in the rock surfaces can be dramatic.
It is shocking to see the rapid erosion caused by seasonal storms and winter’s extreme ravages.
But when fossils become visible in the process,
such occurrences present possibilities for glimpsing back—
into evidence of an age before human history,
to a time where, as some would say,
before culture, there was nature.
Restauration of Sites
Pilgrimage, 2014 (video). The video addresses the loss of innocence in a pastoral landscape and the importance of sanctuary spaces. The video is based on a walk-through of what was once the Chekika Day-Use Area of the Everglades National Park, Florida, during its transition under the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. The plan was to restore the South Florida ecosystem, and within the project’s aims, surrounding private lands were purchased to restore the flow of fresh water levels through the River of Grass[2] to pre-Tamiami Trail[3] construction in 1928.’
In the video “Pilgrimage,” the figure of the walker is overcome by the atmosphere of the swamp, conjuring ghosts of events that took place there before and during its annexation for reclamation. The text of David Henry Thoreau’s “Walking” (1851) is used to comment on the presence rising from what appears to be a wild and untouched landscape. After its closure as a day-use park and while awaiting the implementation of a water diversion plan, Chekika became a dumping ground for unwanted furniture and household appliances. Additionally, it was used as a shooting range. Reclamation of the soil at Chekika involved removing trace elements of lead and other toxic metals left behind from the shell cases of recreational shooters.
Environmental Damage of War
Each landscape poisoned by war is a loss to humanity as a whole. The time to begin mourning the loss is when the uniforms and the tanks roll in. Although the Anthropocene, or the Age of Humans, has not been officially declared, we all now live in a world with potentially harmful effects caused by activities carried out by our species.
Pockets of Time (video) is an investigation of life’s mysteries and how memories resurface. The figure of the digger is often seen in my work. During the Zoom presentation, the video will run in the background while the following text is read: It is now well known that radioactive particles have covered the globe since the atomic bomb was tested and since atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Layers of plastics also cover the planet, and these two conditions may be determining factors in the declaration of the Anthropocene. They are concentrations of ‘no-going-back’ pollution in a kind of ‘global patchwork’ of humanly altered states. The Ukraine/Russian border and the Gaza Strip are two locations where a succession of catastrophic events inflicted on populations and landscapes risk the health of anyone wishing to re-inhabit these areas. It may never be safe to relocate to either place.
The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, but Homo sapiens have existed here for only around 200,000 years. In that relatively short time, we have fundamentally altered the physical, chemical and biological systems on which we and all other organisms depend. In the publication Anthropocene, A Very Short Introduction, Erle C. Ellis outlines many of the characteristics that currently point toward the scientific declaration of the Anthropocene:
Overwhelming evidence now confirms that humans are changing Earth in unprecedented ways. Global climate change, acidifying oceans, shifting global cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and other elements, forests and other natural habitats transformed into farms and cities, widespread pollution, radioactive fallout, plastic accumulation, the course of rivers altered, mass extinctions of species, human transport and introduction of species around the world. These are just some of the many different human-induced global environmental changes that will most likely leave a lasting record in rock strata, the basis for marking new intervals in geologic time.
Established in 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group is an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to studying the Anthropocene as a geological time unit. Ellis was part of it from 2009 to 2023. He quit over the debate of declaring the Anthropocene and the scientific search for the Golden spike; that is the place to provide markers for undeniable proof of humans altering the world we inhabit. The scientific method has historically been to establish the bottom and top layer markers of changes in rock strata. In addition to what we see as proof, the markers must be judged as capable of surviving into the ‘far’ future as undeniable proof. Globally, it is a difficult challenge.
The time we live in has also been called the GREAT ACCELERATION, marked by the loss of species, and some scientists believe that we are entering the sixth mass extinction. In many cases, the damage caused is irreversible to biodiversity and the survival of some biospheres. The World Wildlife Fund found a 73% decline in species between 1970 and 2020. It is also stated that current trends regarding climate and land-use changes could result in the loss of more than a tenth of plant and animal species by the end of the century.
As scientists cannot settle the argument, I, as an artist, must look to other concerns. From a perspective somewhere between humanist and post-humanist responsibilities, my beliefs include that the mourning of any landscape should begin with a thought for those who once inhabited it, worked the land or left it to evolve on its own. This last idea of leaving a landscape to rest has mainly disappeared with the progress of human development and increased population on the planet.
To date, there are probably no untouched locations. It seems that the most we can hope for is that when visitors enter and exit environments that appear pristine, they should strive to leave those environments in the same condition as they found them.
Aside from any negative changes occurring within the natural world, the progress of human industries forms a substantial percentage of detrimental activities enacted on landscapes. And we are all aware that more damaging activities are carried out in the hubris of war. Video excerpt: What If, (from Promises of War)
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Kyiv, Ukraine.[4] Cameras were recording as a tank smashed its way into a traffic circle, chased down, and crushed a car. Witnesses ran to the car and pulled the driver out. Miraculously, he survived. This brutal encounter marked the beginning of a significant escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014 when the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi ended and Russia annexed Crimea.[5] Meanwhile, the landscape in many parts of the Ukraine/Russian border has been poisoned by waste materials left by munitions and ammunitions while the fighting machine moves back and forth. And the lifelong housing projects of people living in rural and urban areas have been destroyed.
It was on October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched their horrendous attack on Israel in the Gaza Strip. It resulted in more than 1,200 deaths of primarily Israeli citizens. The next day, Israel declared war, and the Israel Defence Forces began air strikes over the Gaza Strip. Less than a week later, ground troops and armoured vehicles moved in to start a full-scale invasion.
By January 2025, more than 46,000 Gazans, about 2 percent of the territory’s population, had been killed. And two-thirds of the buildings in the Gaza Strip had been damaged or destroyed. About 1,600 Israelis have died. Indirect deaths are estimated to be multiple times higher in Gaza, and it is a fact that bodies lie crushed under the rubble of destroyed buildings. The number of injured is greater than 100,000, and Gaza has the most amputated children per capita in the world.
Images and reports of this genocide continued to take place as the whole world watched and no powers stepped in to stop it.
When the infrastructures for supporting life are destroyed, the arduous and heartbreaking task of moving cement ruins and other smashed building materials is difficult enough.
The more difficult tasks involve finding and removing the remains of people crushed beneath their homes. Cleaning the soil underneath and simply making space to stand falls behind as the last in the series of steps toward any thought of restoration. It will not be possible to restore any natural water systems for decades, if ever.
And today, as I write these remarks, I am hearing that Donald J. Trump and Netanyahu are touting the idea of taking over the Gaza Strip and creating a new ‘Mediterranean Riviera’ out of the ruined lives and property of Palestinians and in Lebanon. You can bet that the impossible cleanup will take place if greedy billionaires grasp the territory in search of new vacation getaways.
VL: A ‘cleanup to end all cleanups—like a cleanup the likes of which has never been seen before’, will surely be the sales pitch emanating from the mouths of two real estate entrepreneurs. [6]
Ukraine and Gaza represent two regions of suffering that exhibit more than their share of Anthropocene characteristics. In addition to the ‘thin layers of radioactive and plastic particles found everywhere on the globe, the two areas have massive piles of broken cement, ruined building materials, broken water mains and all of the detritus of war tools; essentially, the damage is measurable.
It seems that if the rest of the world is not possessing enough proof of ruination, it would be sensible to admit that conditions of patches like Ukraine and Gaza can be recognized as having crossed over to ‘being there.’
There is a perceived urgency among some scientists of speeding up the declaration of having crossed the line from the Holocene epoch into the Anthropocene.[7]
Another problem that scientists have in deciding that the Anthropocene has begun is the relatively short period of time since its proposed start. That has been since the mid-20th century. Maybe the most pressing concern is not recognizing that human activity is having a shrinking effect on the World—and we are capable of much more destruction in a far shorter period of time.
A Ukrainian woman approaches invading soldiers to give them sunflower seeds. [8]
What can we do to improve the quality of life or the landscape we live within? Sometimes missed is that we live in a finite amount of time, but what happens during this brief moment is infinitely important.
Sunflowers are a symbol of peace in Ukraine. In 1996, to celebrate having given up their nuclear weapons (in 1994), Ukrainian, U.S., and Russian defence ministers planted sunflowers in a ceremony at a missile base in southern Ukraine. More recently, when the tanks rolled into Kyiv, a woman approached heavily armed soldiers. She insisted that they take sunflower seeds from her and put them in their pockets. She shouted that, ‘in case that they died there, at least flowers would grow where they lay down’.
The figure is blindfolded and sitting on top of our world, clinging to a wooden lyre with only one string left. We have come a long way since it was painted in 1886.
Irreversible Changes Within A Very Short Time
We now possess the science to prove ‘that negative changes to the Earth’s surface are our legacy’, even to the point of bragging about the responsibility.
Valerie LeBlanc
March 13, 2025
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[1] Language of Fossils, Fundy, Éditions Basic Bruegel Editions, Moncton, 2022, p.47.
To see the videopoem of the same name: https://vimeo.com/1066645763
[2] American Journalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas coined the name River of Grass in her 1947 environmental classic Everglades: River of Grass. The book defended against draining the Everglades to reclaim land for development, and it came out the same year that The Everglades National Park opened.
[3] The Tamiami Trail was constructed in 1928 to link Tampa Bay and Miami.
[4] Ukraine invasion – TANK crushes civilian car in Kyiv but driver is miraculously rescued alive, The Sun, Feb 24, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xcfJY6QwnY&ab_channel=TheSun, last accessed on March 7, 2025.
[5] At the end of 2024, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded close to 12,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine since the 2022 escalation. The number is probably higher. And, as each side guards the release of data about their forces, the military casualty counts are also questionable, with Russia claiming its losses to be less than Ukraine’s. Consistency in the reporting of lives lost is impossible to find. It makes sense, as accurate tracking of deaths and injuries cannot be precise in a live-war environment.
[6] Public Bragging Rights – A Golden Pager to reward a terrorist. For further information: See videos and articles to available online regarding Donald J. Trump’s collaboration with Netanyahu to carry out attacks through planting explosives in pagers and coordinating the detonation of the devices in Lebanon.
[7] According to Barnosky and Hannibal in their article: Despite Official Vote, the Evidence of the Anthropocene is Clear (April 2, 2024), ‘If we don’t name the Anthropocene, we will hamstring efforts to support a safe operating space for humans and other species.’
[8] Aside from their obvious qualities for beautifying landscapes, sunflowers play an important role in soil remediation. It would be more prudent to prevent damage to biospheres on the planet, but we are lucky to have found out that some plants are useful in efforts to remediate soil already contaminated. Through the process known as phytoextraction, sunflowers are effective in removing lead, chromium, copper, cadmium, and zinc from contaminated soil.
Valerie LeBlanc, May 17, 2025,