RATIONALE
Humans have been present for a minuscule portion of Earth’s history, yet our impact on the environment has had global, life-ending ramifications. I find the proposed term ‘Anthropocene’ to reflect our current time of human transformation of earth to be an apt one. 3 To understand how much the Anthropocene has been an aberration, we must first understand how short our time on Earth really has been, and how wide reaching its effects will be.
For example, in the 1950s Virginia “became the first atomic power generator to produce electrical energy for the U.S. power grid.” 4 Nuclear power creates nuclear waste, and while this nuclear waste has only been being generated for over sixty years, designs for how to safely store this waste must be effective for at least ten thousand years in the future, with scientists nonetheless acknowledging the waste will pose a health threat to humans beyond even then. 5 Imagining the state of humanity ten thousand years in the future much less planning for that future seems unfathomable when you consider that ten thousand years in the past, humans had only just begun to domesticate animals. 6
We benefit from nuclear power today, but our descendants will bear the cost. The choices of my students today will impact the safety and health of the world, not only their world, but the world of their descendants. To be good ancestors, we must understand the weight of that time to make better choices in the present. In this unit, we will begin to reckon with this legacy by understanding the scope of this timeline through visual art.
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