How to View the Anthropocene

This weeks reading focuses on the how different groups of people conceptualize the age of anthropocene. Personally, I do view the anthropocene as an indicator of impending doom. I don’t know how not to. While technologies has made some amazing advances that has projected the human race into earthly gods through the likes of medicine, space travel, and the insane quality of life some individuals possess, I think you would be hard-pressed to find somebody who is knowledgable on the issue to say that all of this has been worth it. It would be impossible to do so if you’re talking to people that have ecocentric view on life compared to people with biocentric or “speciesest” views on life. Over the last year or so, mostly through education at Oregon State University as well as climate change waving the flag of death at me from the foreseeable distance, I have tried to develop more of an ecocentric view on life an how we interact with the environment. I have been trying to view humans as just another species which obviously leads me to view how we have dug our place into this earth as reprehensible. I genuinely have no idea how to begin to understand how Indigenous people must feel after their way of life was torn from them by us. Whyte talks about this in the reading when he says “Yet for many indigenous peoples, the Anthropocene is not experienced as threatening in precisely the same sense because the particular era of settlement I am describing forced many of our societies to let go of so many relationships with plants, animals and ecosystems at a wrongfully rapid pace”. In a lot of ways they have already experienced the anthropocene, or least the start of it. We don’t know how to experience life and subsequently we have destroyed it. I will never be able to connect with the earth as a human should, and yes, I am very pessimistic, but I feel like we are nearing the point in our evolution where this will be available to no one.