24

Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) by Joseph Mallord William Turner. A Romantic representation of human’s relationship to wild Nature.

and time, climatic changes occur over timeframes that easily span a human lifetime. This poses a challenge not easily met by any visual depiction of the issue: how to represent future consequences of climate change that ideally and hopefully will be prevented? It is true that extreme weather events have increased over recent years and will become even more likely in the future due to the warming of the atmosphere. Yet, scientifically speaking, it is not easy to link a single event to the already increased average global temperature. It might require for example, complex meteorological models and a lot of past weather data. Visually connecting the complex issue of climate change to a single and local event of a wildfire, drought or storm risks the criticism that the two are not necessarily connected. Furthermore, it does not do justice to the issue’s large-scale significance and consequences. Local weather patterns are globally connected and interdependent, as are the human activities that cause or mitigate climate change. Visualising climate change through catastrophic images fosters an understanding that downscales the issue to local events while not touching on the issue’s global and temporal complexities. Thirdly, these images of ‘Nature gone wild’ rely on and reproduce very specific conceptions of Nature which create particular political effects. Nature is in itself a highly political category, often used to justify differing and mutually exclusive world-views. To understand the conceptions of Nature evoked through climate change visuals I briefly want to dig into this history and what climate change adds to it. Every living thing stands in a relation to its environment and changes it to a certain degree. If it had not been for cyanobacteria more than two billion years ago considerably changing the atmosphere’s chemical composition by drastically increasing the amount of oxygen, life on this planet would look quite different today. Similarly, humans have always altered their natural surroundings. But since the onset of the Industrial Revolution we have been able to control and dominate Nature more effectively. The consequences of this have become visible through the widespread destruction of natural landscapes. For those who rejected the changes the emerging capitalist system brought with it Nature offered an easily available projection surface, it became the ‘other’, which could be seen as the opposite to the ‘man-made’ environment. Encounters with landscapes and the awe-inspiring events of Nature were idealised as a way of achieving sublime individual experience and these were expressed in paintings, poetry and music. Yet, at the time, this idealised nature was already vanishing. Notwithstanding this, at the end of the 19th century, when the first environmental activists started to appear, depictions of ‘wild Nature’ in paintings and photography were used to support their cause. Every history of Nature is thus a history of humanNature relationships. The idea of Nature and its representations have always been part of the argument about what that relationship should be. Anthropogenic climate change however, is an entirely new order of consequence to humanity’s relationship with Nature. As humanity is changing the composition of the whole atmosphere, the idea of untouched places has become obsolete. Air is everywhere and every living thing is touched by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. Climate change thus challenges our modern conception of a dualistic divide between Nature and Culture as the two become more obviously entangled. While human activities reshape Nature like never before, we also face new challenges: how to deal with melting