Anthropocene Objects: The Lifeboat, What is a Boat?

The Anthropocene has intensified the post-Romantic and anti-Cartesian sense that Nature is not a thing, the planet is not a commodity, and that human life is ecologically intertwined with various other-than-human beings. There are, however, two distinct ways in which one might think about moving beyond the Earth as a commodity. Various theoretical movements have sought to think of all life and matter as vibrant. Despite first appearances this is at odds with indigenous claims for personhood that require a distinction, rather than flattening, of modes of things.