Re-envisioning the Toxic Sublime: National Park Wilderness Landscapes at the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene concept stimulates much debate among geographers. This wider conversation often neglects the role that visual imagery plays in shaping geographical imaginations of the Anthropocene. This article examines artist Hannah Rothstein’s revisionist collection National Parks 2050 to better understand the intersections of visual imagery and the Anthropocene. Rothstein’s collection draws on Works Progress Administration–style artwork to visualize a bleak future. In particular, her artwork mobilizes the aesthetic of the toxic sublime. To assess National Parks 2050’s use of the toxic sublime, we conducted a visual analysis that found Rothstein’s use of the concept innovative in two important ways. First, Rothstein’s toxic sublime is derived from deeper traditions of the romantic sublime, which diverges from existing understandings of the toxic sublime as the counterpart to a technological sublime. Second, it brings two underexamined themes of the toxic sublime to the fore. The first theme is death and disappearance; the second is scale and the toxic. We argue that Rothstein’s toxic sublime re-instills Burkean sublime’s heightened awareness—here understood as horror and despair—into the romantic natural sublime of U.S. national park wilderness landscapes.