The Glacier and Me: Understanding the Human Being in the Anthropocene

In this chapter, I will contemplate a new understanding of the human being that is needed in times of the Anthropocene. An understanding of the human being that is at the same time an understanding of nature, and helps us gain a deeper understanding of the complex and inherently relational reality we live in. When I stand in front of a glacier and sense that both of us, the glacier and me, are threats at the same time as we are under threat, I understand and sense my relations with the forces of nature in a very different way than for example the farmers in Öræfi in Iceland did when they decided early last century to divert a glacial river away from their lands using only picks, shovels, horses and their own hands (M. Jackson, The Secret Lives of Glaciers (West-Brattleboro, Vermont: Greenwriters Press, 2019), chapter 4). We are not opposite each other anymore, me and the glacier, rather we are melting together. This melting is both happening in a literal sense as a result of the climate crisis, as well as metaphorically as we are understanding better and better how the borders between humans and nature are disappearing or melting away, and how they have perhaps never existed. The chapter will address the question of what characterizes this new understanding of the human being from the perspective of relational ontologies and embodied aesthetic knowledge.