Feeling the Curve of the Earth: Deviant Democracies and Ecological Uncertainties

By Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Published in  Mutating Ecologies in Contemporary Art, edited by Christian Alonsol (Barcelona: University of Barcelona Press, 2019)

In an atmosphere in which post-democratic tendencies could take on viral proportions, even the ‘slow violence’ carried out against the dispossessed of the Global South is accelerating and the hard-fought global pact to keep global warming under two degrees is threatened with demolition, a number of vital questions are raised. Namely, how can the human species, individually and collectively, learn to feel once again ‘the curve of the Earth’? Does salvation lie, as mid-century scientist Vernadsky believed, in the cephalisation of the human mind and evolution to the Nösphere? How could the current post-democratic deviation be turned around?