In The Anthropocene Cycle, Director/writer Georg Koszulinski presents a montage of his thoughts and feelings about human impact on climate change. The film was 13 years in the making, and in just over an hour runtime, Koszulinski spins through a dizzying variety of raw facts lashed together with some ancient poetry, comic book plot-lines, Norse Mythology, and a 1985 speech by Carl Sagan. Part of the film is devoted to un-restored footage of Oppenheimer and the Trinity atomic bomb project, with quotes about Shiva and the corrosion of destructive energies. “Anthropocene” is a name gaining popularity. It was suggested that a geological epoch following the Holocene be defined, dating from the first significant human impact on global systems.
Woven into this tapestry is an autobiographical journal with snippets of grainy home movies. The comic book influence comes from Alan Moore’s 1980s Swamp Thing series, about a plant that believes itself to be a man. Koszulinski discusses mass extinction events, past and future, and imagines what the current state of Earth might say about us to a visiting extraterrestrial.
The Anthropocene Cycle is a fascinating art project, pulling together an impressive array of clips, trippy cinematic visual and sound effects, and excerpts of thoughts and feelings sure to take a viewer on a cosmic journey of self-reflection. What have we done to the planet as a race? What, if anything, can we do to fix it? Are we just violent, talking monkeys?
As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explained in his TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, If the history of the universe was mapped to one calendar year, all of human recorded history would only occur in the last 14 seconds of that year. In contrast to the infinitesimal time span of human thought, however, our narcissism seems to know no bounds.
“…a montage of thoughts and feelings about human impact on climate change…”
The planet has experienced five previous mass extinction events, the last one occurring 65.5 million years ago, which wiped out the dinosaurs. In one of these events, 75% of all species became extinct. Yet here we are in our lovely garden. We are fat, dumb, and happy in a narrow band of temperature, air pressure, atmosphere, potable water, and gravity that allows us to skulk around for 70-odd years or so. We seem oblivious to the fact that we may be currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction.
I’m not sure how excited we should be about all this. Whether it’s a 9-mile diameter meteor slamming into the Yucatan peninsula or climate change from human activity destroying our narrow band of happiness, it’s part of the cosmic cycle that this all ends and begins again. In 1992, comedian/philosopher George Carlin said it best: “The planet is fine. The people are f****d.” One irksome fallacy that climate change (which is absolutely real and impactful; we’re not even going to go there) discussions indulge in is calling out “human impact on natural systems” like we’re some external force. Human activity is part of the natural world… and while we may greenhouse gas our way out of a place to live… that’s a process enabled by nature. It’s all part of the same system, and as Carlin said, another cycle of some kind may follow. Certainly, the engines of the universe will grind on long after we are gone.
That said, however, one of the defining characteristics of the human condition is that we ponder our fate. I prefer Carlin’s nihilistic musings to Koszulinski’s apocalyptic narcissism in The Anthropocene Cycle, but the film is undeniably thought-provoking and entertaining.
"…What have we done to the planet as a race? What, if anything, can we do to fix it? "
