I wonder if we can even look at climate change in the same way given just the breadth of the Earth Systems that are changing rapidly in front of us.
[On the subject of the California wild fires of 2025]
Duke Professor Dan(iel) Richter
Maybe one way of looking at the birth of humanity is the fire. It was “domesticated” and it became a huge shift in how our lives got more complex.
Artist Noémie Goudal
Listen and Subscribe
Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene is the first major exhibition to examine the Anthropocene through the lens of contemporary photography.
Listen on
Bios
ARTIST BIO
Noémie Goudal builds and documents elaborate constructions to showcase illusion by photography or film, and the organic as “invaded” by the human-made. Goudal aims to understand landscape by approaching it from multiple directions, blending traditional photographic technique with physical manipulation of the environment. She is interested in exploring forensic histories of geological time, or “deep time,” allowing the land to explain itself through its own history rather than through the history of humanity. In her Les Mécaniques series, the artist creates new landscapes from existing ones by inserting fragments of mirrors into the land and rephotographing them. Her work encourages the viewer to think more consciously about how time—in this case, geological “deep time”—shapes our perceptions of nature.
FACULTY BIO
Dan Richter is professor of soils at Duke University and director of the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory in South Carolina, where he and about 100 scientists and collaborators study the Earth’s critical zone “from tree top to bedrock”, meaning the physics, chemistry, biology, and human interactions with the atmosphere-to-aquifer land system, a landscape that has experienced some of the most serious agricultural erosion and land degradation in America. He is author of the Cambridge book Understanding Soil Change (with Dan Markewitz), and director of the international network of long-term soil experiments. As an undergraduate philosophy major, he is fascinated by the history of scholarly disciplines and how inter-disciplinarity in the 21st century may transform the academy. He is member of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy that will propose that the contemporary geologic epoch be named the Anthropocene with mid-20th century Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point.
Transcript
Transcript coming soon.
Related to this Articles
Show