The first photo highlights the origin of humanity’s impact on the Earth, beginning with the discovery of fire. Both elements of the picture are labeled: the fire and the human. Fire is the starting point, emphasizing the Promethean value on technology. Fire is, in a cliche manner, the spark that sets human development in motion. There is a line that creates a path–an energy path, almost–up through the human’s leg, up the spine, and ultimately to the brain, leaving the human with a content expression. The energy of the fire, transferred through heat, conjures a positive response in this human’s brain, representative of the ‘spark’ in human development that fire caused. Since the discovery of fire and the glorification of the Promethean myth, humanity has benefitted greatly at the expense of the health of the natural environment. It is said that to find a place on Earth untrammeled by man is virtually impossible; this first feature image communicates this Promethean ideology and introduces the idea that the discovery of fire has contributed to the demise of the planet, and along with it, the demise of the human race.
Transitioning from the early stages of Promethean technology demonstrated in the first image, the second picture represents the ecological destruction that can result from our overuse of such technologies, and the evolved human understanding of technology as no longer a tool for survival, but instead has become central focus of human life. The picture captures the reality of urban sprawl, depicting an expansive favela occupying a space that was once wild and free. This represents humanity’s domination and exploitation of nature in a general sense — we have taken all that nature has to offer and used it as a building block for human civilization. The striking paradox shown in this image is that the implementation of Earth’s natural resources towards technologies that contributes to expansive urban sprawl are the ones that will lead to the Earth’s destruction. A similar paradox is acknowledged by urban theorist Mike Davis, who says “over-urbanization is the end of urbanization.” By this he means that urban super sprawl like that depicted above, will lead to the downfall of all urban environments and potentially the human race. This concept can be expanded; our extreme overuse of technologies and natural resources will be the very action that could destroy the Earth as well as ourselves.
The third feature image, Greenpeace’s representation of a decapitated man as a severed tree stump, serves as a shocking ultimate prognosis of the consequences of human activity previously depicted by the Promethean technology of the first feature image, and furthered by the subsequent urban sprawl of the second feature image. The portrayal of man and nature as one felled object argues that, because of man’s inherent connection to the environment, when we destroy the earth, we also destroy ourselves. The darkened color scheme and ominous monochrome gradients of the grass, water, and sky communicate a similarly dark prospective future. Additionally, the synonymous understanding of man as nature is reinforced as the man’s hands dig into the earth, resembling the roots of his tree grasping for life, rendered useless through his death. Similarly, the man’s skin is peeling away from his inner stump as bark does from a dying tree, communicating the futile dissociation of man from nature. However, most explicitly stated is the impending fatality of human attempts to distinguish man from his nature. The final feature image effectively communicates the consequence of the Anthropocene through it’s tag-lined statement: we are not immune to our bulldozing, “not only a tree is cut down.”
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The Anthropocene 
