Witnessing

Title: Witnessing the rapid melt of Hardangerjøkulen, the sixth largest glacier found in Finse, Norway, August 2019.

Author Professor Karen Malone, Swinburne University of Technology

As we share the experience we are seeking to map out how humans should be or could understand what it means to be human in the shadow of a melting Glacier, instead we are waking the social imaginary, enlivening alternative visions. We consider that better worlds are possible, and those possibilities may emerge if we sit quiet and listen to the coughing Glacier. Climate change as an ecological provocation is the crisis of the current human condition. A fear of losing something we never had, we thought we loved, a form of ‘eco-nostalgia’ emerges.  What does it mean to deal with at least the possibility of catastrophe? Fear and grief are our walking and witnessing companions.