Imagining the global ecological crisis: Visual politics in the age of Anthropocene.

MARCELO SAGUIER

Oaxaca

Congreso; Conference on Earth System Governance - Urgent Transformations and Earth System Governance: Towards Sustainability and Justice; 2019

UNAM - Earth System Governance Project

The experience of the socio-ecological transformations related to the Anthropocene is changing the prevailing understandings of our relation to Earth. The ?global ecological crisis? emerges as a concept to reference the discussions, policy actions and social responses that have begun to take place in relation these transformations. This concept is not complete or hegemonic. Indeed, it is a site of political contestation. The awareness of a global ecological crisis takes place at a time when visual images have a particularly important role in shaping awareness and responses to global scale issues. Images can often create a sense of identification or connection with issues, peoples, species and landscapes in distant geographies, even without having direct experiences with them. Moreover, they can create the awareness that environmental, political and social events taking place around the world are interconnected by their being the result of a common global ecological crisis. In this respect, visual images have a pedagogical role in eliciting the political and social transformations needed to face responses to the global ecological crisis. Yet, different ways of seeing the ecological crisis relates to potentially different political ways of understanding and responding. Responses can include: anticipation as planned action, anticipation without action, conscious or unconscious neglect, etc. However, while the visual representations of the global ecological crisis have different political and social responses, what needs to be understood are the linkages between visual representations and responses. That is, that which makes visual representations of the global ecological crisis political. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of visual politics in shaping the imagination of the global ecological crisis, its related future scenarios and responses. To develop this theme, in the first section I review the main conceptual discussions in the field of visual politics in the International Relations literature, drawing particular attention to their relevance for thinking about global environmental issues. Different visual representations open up, as well as foreclose, potentially different pathways of governance responses. In the second section I offer a typology of visual representations of the global ecological crisis and related responses. In the third section I analyze the interests and power implications of these representations for the main actors of the global environmental politics (institutional, market and social actors) with particular reference to Latin America.