In scholarship the Anthropocene has been tied up with the experience of the unthinkable by thinkers including Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway, and Amitav Ghosh. Yet, the current COVID-19 pandemic—which as a crisis also exemplifies the human impact on and a reshaping of environments—challenges the pervasiveness of the key concepts of abstraction and unthinkability. Instead, the pandemic has turned the Anthropocene into a concrete, intensely lived, globally shared experience.
According to Edward O. Wilson, human beings have an “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.” And art writer Jack Burnham even maintained that “art is a form of biological signal”.