A DUBIOUS HONOUR
Eco-doc Anthropocene chronicles the end of the world as we know it
Who knew the end of the world could be so beautiful? The latest eco-doc from Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes, Watermark), co-directed by Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier, shows viewers some of the large-scale changes we are making to the planet. Like the second sunrise of a hydrogen bomb, they are equal parts stunning and scary.
Take “Bagger 293,” an earthmoving machine working an open-pit coal mine in Germany. Ninety-six metres tall and using 16 megawatts of power, it could scoop up the material needed to build the great pyramid in less than a month. It looks like something out of science-fiction; in fact, you can see one in the background of a shot in TV’s Westworld. The mine is expanding, displacing local residents; but it remains a weirdly beautiful sight. Not all the film’s segments are doom-and-gloom. Narrated by Alicia Vikander, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch visits an electric-car-battery plant in Michigan, and delivers a timelapse trip through the 57-kilometre Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland, which will reduce the dangers and pollution of trucking freight along mountain roads. The film opens and closes in Kenya’s Nairobi National Park, where mammoth mounds of elephant tusks are set ablaze to stop them from being sold.
Without getting didactic, the directors illustrate some of the ironies of our age. Take the seawall in Gudong, China, being constructed out of what look to be giant concrete jacks (the kids’
ANTHROPOCENE: THE HUMAN EPOCH
★★★★ out of 5
Cast: Alicia Vikander
Directors: Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, Nicholas de Pencier
Duration: 1h27m
toy). Its purpose is to protect a nearby oilfield from rising sea levels. You connect the dots.
The film also introduces viewers to some terminology needed to talk about such large-scale projects. Anthroturbation is the process by which the crust of the planet is significantly altered by human activity, like the aforementioned tunnel. Technofossils are artifacts, everything from plastic to concrete, that will persist on a geological time scale. And the technosphere is the sum total of our manufactured output, estimated at 30 trillion tonnes.
The movie takes its title from the Anthropocene epoch, a proposal, still under consideration by geologists, that we rename this time period (currently known as the Holocene), as the Anthropocene, to mark the dubious honour of the time when Homo sapiens began to significantly affect the Earth.
Some proponents peg the Anthropocene at the beginning of the agricultural revolution following the last Ice Age. Others say 1945, when human-made radioactive debris first shows up in the geological record (and will persist for millennia). The filmmakers’ stunning images, captured around the world, make it clear that whenever it started, it is ongoing.