In June 2012, the Rio+ 20 UN Earth Summit – the third international conference on sustainable development hosted by the UN – opened with a short animated film entitled Welcome to the Anthropocene (Globaïa 2012). In just over three minutes, the film presents a history of the world since the industrial revolution, framed as the dawn of a new geological era, the Anthropocene. Progress, in the form of science, technology and industrial development, is depicted as emanating from England, bringing with it agricultural productivity, connectivity and population longevity. From 1950, graphs of environmental and socio-economic production appear, communicating a sharp acceleration in rates of transformation, as the planet is enrolled into a single consumption system. The film portrays this sweeping history through an unfolding three-dimensional computer model, with lines radiating out from Europe into a planetary network punctuated by bright nodes, which represent large cities. Layered atop of this cybernetic representation is a graph condensing dozens of different indexes of change in a single, upward trajectory: methane; forest loss; domesticated land; telephone connections; tourism; population.

The film was made by an NGO called Globaïa. Founded in 2009 by Félix Pharand-Deschênes, Globaïa's mission is the promotion of planetary awareness through ‘the advancement of a science-based, transdisciplinary, emotion-driven and unified understanding of the major socio-ecological issues of our time’ (Globaïa 2022: np). Besides producing the opening film for Rio+ 20, Globaïa have helped design significant environmental iconography, collaborating, for example, with the Stockholm Resilience Centre on their Planetary Boundaries project, and David Attenborough for his latest Netflix documentary (Globaïa 2022). Globaïa's film inherits much from the cultural and aesthetic tradition we have associated with modern environmentalism in this book. We witness a single planet floating in space (our spaceship home); a narrator conveying a view from nowhere in their call to protect it; images of seemingly unpeopled environments as that which is under threat; emphasis on the urgency of working together in unified action to avert further crisis. As we have also argued throughout the book, such aesthetic devices conspire to sidestep a more critical reckoning with root causes and extent. They keep invisible the multiple sites and movements of resistance that have challenged the smooth unfolding of colonial modernity – what Stefania Barca (2020) has recently called the ‘forces of reproduction’.