UrbAtomicOcean
Myths More Than Fiction: The Onset of Epic Disasters and Agency over the Legend
Losha, Griffin, and William
Thinkers across the world have been proposing various frameworks to contextualize humanity or a chosen faucet of humanity’s impacts within global epochs. The Anthropocene is the most widely accepted framework and is defined as the era when humanity’s agency over the globe began to rapidly increase. The start of the Anthropocene is defined by the Great Acceleration (1950s) and is characterized by massively increasing global CO2 levels which can be measured as a geological record in ice sheet layers. Discussions surrounding the start of the Anthropocene, whether it should include the Halocene, and what geological, social, or environmental factors are its key characteristics caused a fracturing in the discourses: people began defining epochs or ‘cenes’ of every type. Any characteristic of humanity and any paradigm shift across any subject became the primary characteristic of a distinct ‘cene’: Technocene, Urbanocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Pyrocene are just a fraction of the concepts that emerged. We have countless distinct classifications of human epochs, but this fracturing imposes a new framework that neglects the implicit entanglement of all the ‘cenes’. We define the UrbAtomicOcean as the knot tied between the Urbanocene, Atomicocene and AnthropOcean.
The Urbanocene, moves away from the geologic lens of the Anthropocene, and focuses on Anthro- or the human element. This ‘cene’ delves into the relationships between urbanization and urban areas and the environmental trends associated with them. (Chwałczyk, 2020).
The Atomicocene is defined by the pivotal point in human history to harnessing the power of the atom, and extends across the artificial, long-lasting impacts it has had on people, plants, animals, and the earth itself (Chia, 2015).
The AnthropOcean frames humanity within the context of the oceans: in terms of what humanity has taken from the oceans, how humanity can learn from the oceans, as well as the mythologies and stories birthed by human-ocean interactions.(Brugidou & Fabien, 2018)
These three unique ‘cenes’ interact in a variety of ways: Nuclear power sustains cities, predominantly coastal cities. The ocean is utilized to cool nuclear plants, but can also lead to radioactive leakage which pollutes natural ecosystems and human biomes. The city relies heavily on the ocean, for trade, for food, for water, thus the history of cities is also the history of ocean navigation. Under our current climate the worlds largest cities are under threat of flooding due to sea level rise: that which connects cities and mediates movement between them also stands to sink them to the sea flood. Nuclear energy has often been a proposed solution to decarbonizing our energy systems, which is the most necessary initiative to slowing global warming and sea level rise. But nuclear energy brings about its own array of issues.
As we analyze the pivot points of these three ‘cenes’ we see a consistent dichotomy between the positives and negatives of themes. As we continue our analysis the bipolarity will become even more clear. If one thing can be learned from our constellation, it is perhaps that when discussing various facets of the Anthropocene it is impossible to disentangle them; however, since the frameworks for each has been constructed independently we will first investigate each ‘cene’ then we will build the constellation.
Urbanocene
This collage represents the transformation of the world into an urban society and eventually an apocalyptic landscape. We depict the hidden axis through the transportation of time and the development of society from the bottom right to the upper left. The collage demonstrates a passage along the axis of time passing from the right to the left, and in the opposite direction to what one may expect, to demonstrate how this urban world we have created requires unsustainably consuming Earth’s resources to keep expanding in the short run.
The map begins with the roots of civilization in the bottom right where we see a neolithic area farm illustrated by Melissa Hogenboom. It then moves through to an image of grand skyscrapers representing the transition to a fully urban society from history.com. Then the image of the Fukushima power plant from BBC is used to illustrate the massive energy consumption requirements of urban areas. As urban population share and total population continues to grow, cities will require increasing amounts of energy, which, in short, has led to more intense natural disasters which were not foreseen when the plan was outlined. The upper leftmost image depicts the BBC imagining of Manchester after the Appocolypse and is a depiction of what the world will come to if we don’t stop consuming at the current rates. All of the images were layered atop an urban map background because this shows house cities are fundamental to the structure of society. At the top right of the map, one can see Mathew Torro’s illustration of predicted sea level rise in Miami. Miami is one of the largest cities in America and will be at a grave risk in the upcoming century as ocean levels continue to rise and the extremely flat and unelevated city is slowly but continually effected.
Atomicocene
“For my collage I wanted to show the axis of time through the shape of a nuclear mushroom cloud. The movement of this collage is from top to bottom, in the direction a nuclear bomb would be dropped. At the top is a map from the Los Alamos Laboratory showing the Bikini Atoll with both native names and US military names for the islands. This claiming of the atoll by the US directly led to the US using it as a testing site, with the image of the nuclear explosion coming from the first tests at Bikini Atoll. Then moving further down is an image of a native cemetery being looked at by two US service members. This is then the end result of the islands being completely uninhabited, as well as indicative of the health problems and death that followed many people who were in the vicinity during the tests.” — Losha
AnthropOcean
This image illustrates the urban catastrophe resulting from sea level rise. The background map illustrates the current coastlines around the northern half of Atlantic ocean. Floating in the center, Athanasius Kircher’s map of Atlantis from his book Mundus Subterraneus a section of Manhattan from the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps are both being swept away by the by ocean waves. The AnthropOcean is characterized by several different human-ocean dynamics. Through this image we try to join together ancient stories of humans and the ocean with predictions of the future. Here we are essentially comparing Manhattan to the sunken city of Atlantis and relating how mythology and predictions can be very similar in substance, but also conceptually.
The previous image depicts ocean related lore, but does not overlooks the physical ways humans interact with the ocean. Through this second AnthropOcean Scenographic map, we aim to show how humans have interacted with, presently interact with, and will one day interact with the ocean. Humans have interacted with the oceans for thousands of years along the surface near coasts. There are even examples where groups of people have undergone generational physiological changes to be better swimmers. The first image, although depicting a yacht, shows how people have used the ocean for millennia: as a source of food and transportation. Moving through time and depth, we see how current ocean Technologies like including deep sea drones, allow for unprecedented interactions between human and marine wildlife. Moving into the future and along the ocean floor we see an underwater city concept. This concept for underwater habitations may look like science fiction; it is, but it’s not completely outlandish. There are currently a number of architectural concept designs that illustrate possible underwater structures. In fact right off of the coast of Key Largo, although not in use, the Aquarius Ocean Habitat provides 400ft of living and laboratory space for research. This last image was chosen in particular as it relates to the previous stereographic map, illustrating that although we tell these stories of great cities lost to floods and sunken to the ocean floor, we also tell stories of great cities flourishing at the sea floor.
Crystalizing UrbAtomicOcean
This Scenographic map draws the combined themes across the previous four maps: ocean exploitation, urban disaster, and nuclear facility exacerbating disasters. This image is set along the Florida coast: technically the upper area depicts St Joe, FL while the lower orange area shows the Turkey Point power plant. Most of the the water and coastal areas have been drawn by hand or copied from other areas. The image of the onlookers is the same from the Atomicocene map native cemetery being looked at by two US service members. In the center, an ocean wave is approaching the city and power plant, and has swept up Atlantis from the bottom of the ocean and a cohort of fishing boats scraping the sea floor. Lastly at the bottom right, the Aquarius Underwater Habitat is being uncovered by the wave. This single wave holds quite a few meanings. For starters it is literally rushing inland above the Florida coast to inundate the city and nuclear reactor. This could happen in the future and would kill thousands of people and leave the area highly toxic. This wave also represents the slower encroaching issue of sea level rise that will eventually sink the city. The last meaning is that this wave is sweeping away the past: the seabed dredgers, the toxic-ocean-polluting cities, Nuclear reactors, and the issue of sea level rise itself; as we sweep away this disaster scenario and that which would have caused it we also sweep away the stories and fear of sea-level, nuclear-compounded disaster.
The concept for this map took shape after creating the map below. This disaster is tied deeply to the Turkey Point case study.
Case Study: Turkey Point
This map hones in on an area along the Florida coast as a case study. The yellow line represents the Turkey Point evacuation area for emergencies. The red circles correspond to the populations of individual census block groups, giving an image of the urban area of Miami. The various blue colors represent sea level rise scenarios, with the darker blue indicating areas that will be underwater with a higher sea level rise. Data for this map has been gathered as follows: Turkey Point Area, Census Populations, Sea Level Rise.
Point of Life Diagram
This point of life diagram depicts the three different ‘cenes this project focuses on, arranged in the traditional trefoil symbol that represents nuclear energy. The Urbanocene segment contains an image of the night lights of south Florida, south Florida from the Human Footprint project which incorporates additional data to provide a more accurate picture of human impact, and building footprints from the Miami area. The AnthropOcean segment consists of a map depicting the Exclusive Economic Zones around south Florida, coral reefs off the coast of Turkey Point nuclear facility, and boat anchorages near Miami Beach. The Atomicocene portion is made up of a diagram of the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki nicknamed “Fatman,” a map depicting nuclear explosions in orange and nuclear reactors in green (focusing on the US), and an aerial image of Turkey Point nuclear facility, reduced to simple black and white forms. At the center, linking these three ‘cenes is the combined map of the Miami area, demonstrating how these three different ‘cenes with their different representations can all be looked at via the Miami area.
Systems Diagram
The Systems Diagram depicts the construction of the combined-’cene’ map: the uppermost layer shows the institutions that played a primary role in collecting the data that was used in ,not just our map depictions, but also the base maps that allowed for our construction. Edges connect the topmost institution nodes to the specific data sets they were used to build. Because these are the data sets we used for our maps, we choose to bundle the nodes under the ‘cenes’ they built up. With our data in mind, we listed as many variables as we could imagine that played a role in the interconnectedness of our ‘cenes’. The third layer of variable nodes are connected both to the ‘cenes’ and to each other with green, black, and red edges. Green arrows point to a direct outcome of the ‘cenes’ and, more specifically, each data set that is touched upon. Red arrows point towards to the resulting consequences of these outcomes. Each red arrow is accompanied by text telling of the process by which the end result comes about. It is also interesting to further observe how the variables that describe the former two ‘cenes’ relate to human agents while variables related to anthropOcean lack human adjacency: our history of harming the planet has created this negative feedback loop with rippling secondary and tertiary environmental damages. While our efforts do show industry improvements, the effects of historical damage persist and compound with current damaging practices. The final layer of the systems diagram is simply the compounded-cenes map and the data sets used to create it.
The structure of this diagram illustrates the nature of the nodes and the conceptual relations between themes within the nodes: the upper layers employ rigid and managed edges and equidistant nodes which reflects how these databases are directly connected to each other existing in these managed networks and repositories. The variables separate the compound-cenes map from the others and lay sprawling out from each cene. This region acts as the putty for which the compound map is constituted upon while coming after layers of databases and institutions as if to say: ‘this human collected data is proof these variables exist’, and in their existence they escape our understanding. This tiny depiction represents a network of nested complex systems for which we really don’t understand, but that can stand as the conceptual guidelines for our epochal map.
