Search

This article submerges theory into the ocean in order to shed light on how the dissonance between lived experience and the epistemologically complex data of climate change can be culturally mediated to become a recognizable form of reinterpretation. By attentively and imaginatively situating critique in polluted milieux, this piece intends to close-read how photography, time lapse and slow-motion techniques might help us foreground the emergencies and environmental changes of the present by considering past experiences of extinction due to capitalist accumulation. That is, how these emergencies and multispecies injustices woven through the knots of life of the current epoch are portrayed, the political implications how they are presented and the contradictions that arise from them. This will be done by placing theory in the images presented in Chris Jordan’s Albatross (2017) and Jeff Orlowski & XL Catlin Seaview Survey’s Chasing Coral (2017). Finally, this text tries to exemplify how we might be living in the Necrocene, the age of extinction, which leaves nothing but ruins in its wake. In other words, this text aims to situate media, theory and ecology in a joint narrative while veering towards a critical and alternative nomenclature for our epoch.

Through the theoretical framework of the Necrocene, the age of death and extinction due to capitalist accumulation, this article tries to analyze and flesh out the current sociopolitical and ecological crisis of the Maldives archipelago as a symptom of what is to come on a planetary scale. It will analyze how knots of life play part in the ecology of the Maldives as a case study. Through the close reading and scrutiny of contemporary literature in the fields of Environmental Humanities, Extinction Studies and Political Ecology, this essay aims to engage with the pressing matter of the Anthropocene, its materialities and its imaginaries. Finally, it ambitiously provides further thought on how to approach the Necrocene as a global multifocal crisis, aiming to build up on the idea of Climate X.

In using the idea of Necrocene, the age of death and extinction due to capitalist accumulation, as opposed to the Anthropocene, this article will discuss how green capitalism is a ramification of the business-as-usual neoliberal praxis as it does not contemplate the pressing matters caused by capitalism as it exists today which are inherently linked to inequity, exploitation, death and extinction. Furthermore, through this lens, it will generate a critique of the Green New Deal and provide speculations on the planetary future. Finally, this article ambitiously aims to illustrate how through the imaginaries of death and extinction, capitalism and green capitalism can be challenged as they prove to be deathly and inconsistent to the creation of fruitful inroads for future alternatives towards the Eleutherocene: the age of liberated Earth and Humanity.