Ruins of the Anthropocene: The Aesthetics of Arctic Climate Change

In the Anthropocene, ruin appreciation is shifting its focus from crumbling architecture to the deteriorating planet. Whereas Romantic and modern ruin gazing privileged nature’s reconquest of the built environment, now, the carbon-intensive infrastructures of global capitalism are turning nature itself to ruin. By critiquing popular representations of the melting Arctic—a visual trope within Anthropocene aesthetics involving images of shrinking icebergs, melting glaciers, and drowning polar bears—this article explicates how both conceptions of ruins and actual, material processes of ruination are shifting away from manmade infrastructure toward the natural environment. I argue that ruins in the Anthropocene are distinct in that natural ruins, especially icy ones, will not persist on the landscape, particularly as environmental degradation accelerates and is upscaled to encompass entire regions like the Arctic, if not the whole planet. By applying Romantic aesthetic principles, I critique the two dominant categories of representations of the current geological epoch: the picturesque and the sublime. As with Romantic and modern ruin iconography, depictions of Anthropocene ruins harness these elements to induce feelings of awe, melancholy, and resignation. These reactions might now be more problematic, however, because helplessness and passive voyeurism could inhibit action on climate change. I thus conclude that refocusing the Anthropocene gaze on the third aesthetic principle—the beautiful, which emphasizes the tangible and comprehensible—might be more conducive to transforming aesthetics into action and fostering an effective rather than affective ethics of planetary care and stewardship.