Witnessing the Anthropocene: affect and the problem of scale

Abstract

As bushfires raged across the eastern states of Australia from September 2019 and into 2020, their scale defied comprehension. What did 46 million burnt acres mean? Or a billion dead animals, or smoke plumes extending across the Pacific to Chile, or 300 million tonnes of carbon emitted into the atmosphere? How to unknot this aggregated scale with the hundreds of fires burning at different times and places, and with varied intensity? How did the scale of the fires in turn relate to that of the climate crisis, to the planet itself? And what of the links between this accelerating catastrophe and the slow violence of deforestation and excessive irrigation, exacerbated by large-scale corporate farming on lands stolen from the First Nations peoples who had managed them — and their fires — for tens of thousands of years? The fires were intensely affecting and yet impossible to grasp — and perhaps even more intense precisely because their scale so challenged the imagination. Across the mediascape, efforts to relate the spread and scale of the bushfires proliferated: Reuters built a page comparing individual fires to cities and countries around the world; The Guardian created interactive maps and repurposed data from NASA’s satellite-based hotspot detection program; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation produced an annotated gallery of aerial images. While the macro effects of the fires tended to be conveyed in infographics and from the air, voices from the ground testified to their local and intimate impacts on families and communities, and to the growing outrage over the failure of conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison to rise to the occasion, or even grasp its import. But the challenge of reconciling macro, micro and the relations between them remained: how, indeed, to bear witness to the scale of destruction at once immense and intimate?