“Circularity” relates to a needed systemic overhaul in the way that we produce and dispose of materials. Instead of making an item to be used only once or twice and then tossed in the garbage—to sit in a trash dump for eternity—the idea of circularity encourages us to develop more sustainable approaches to the things we manufacture. If we can eliminate the linear cycle of production (creation to landfill) and transform it into a circular one predicated on reuse, recycling, repurposing, and regeneration, then we can eventually stem the profligate rubbish streams we generate and transform to a zero-waste economy.

The works in this section exemplify the concepts embedded in circularity, their makers creating innovative art out of objects they have removed from the waste stream—political posters, discarded bottles caps, used Nike shoes, single-use plastic bags, scraps of wood, shipping envelopes, avocadoes, and even FEMA tarps.

This section is a part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.

This Vital Earth encourages an ethical recentering in human consciousness of the approximately 4.5-billion-year-old “pale blue dot” (as scientist Carl Sagan described the Earth). In the mere 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have evolved, our planet’s centrality has become eclipsed by humanity’s view of itself as the center of life. Artists represented here revel in the interconnectedness of all living and nonliving things and return our gaze to the biodiversity that supports healthy and balanced ecosystems.

Trees, which store carbon dioxide and push it into the ground with their roots, are the predominant motif in this section. Arboreal life helps to cool the atmosphere, like a kind of natural air conditioner, while also releasing necessary oxygen into the air. Assuredly, human life is contingent on the existence of trees and other living beings. The U.S. Department of Agriculture proposes that one large tree can provide a day’s supply of oxygen for up to four people. In recent years, scientists have learned about the intricate social networks trees have evolved, and some ecologists have posited that trees are even intelligent beings. Yet, deforestation—the result of agricultural expansion, cattle ranching, and commercial production of such goods as palm oil and timber—continues to threaten the plant life that has evolved over 400 million years. During just the last 12,000 years, humans have cleared nearly 50 percent of the planet’s trees, threatening to destabilize ecosystems and life forms of all kinds.

This section is part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.

This room-sized installation, Children of the Earth (2019) by Ernesto Neto (b. 1964), pays homage to the Amazon rainforest and emphasizes the fecundity of the natural world at large. Neto’s immersive, cocoon-like presentation invites visitors to revel in the senses as he metaphorically transforms the space into a living organism to be activated by guests. Upon passing through the gallery threshold, they encounter a vibrant, sensual environment that entices them to explore and interact with it.

This installation is part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.

For more than two decades, Maya Lin (b. 1959) has engaged the vocabulary of cartography, producing artworks as diverse as stand-alone sculptures, civic monuments, and room-sized installations that manifest the complex natural and cultural systems operating in the world. In 2012 the Museum invited her to make Pin River–Tahoe Watershed in response to the unique Lake Tahoe landscape. After visiting with scientists at the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, Lin created a series of works that visualize the foundational structures of the planet—in part by manufacturing an architecture of its natural features.

This work is a part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.

Several of the exhibition’s themes coalesce in Pierre Huyghe’s riveting nineteen-minute video Untitled (Human Mask) (2014): interspecies relationships, extreme weather, and extinction. Huyghe (b. 1962) sets his moving-image work in post-apocalyptic Fukushima, Japan, after the nuclear disaster of 2011, which occurred in the wake of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami that surged over the seawall and flooded nuclear reactors. After panning remnants of the devastated city, the camera enters a small, abandoned restaurant, where a mysterious creature remains with a cat.

This work is a part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.

The works on view in the following galleries visually explore human impact on the Earth, primarily through the Museum’s Altered Landscape Photography Collection, which focuses on changes in natural, built, and virtual environments. The concept of the Anthropocene relates to the indelible, colossal imprint Homo sapiens have made on the planet. It suggests we have left the Holocene and entered a new geological epoch. The term was coined by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel laureate and former director of atmospheric chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, during an international science conference in 2000. To signal this new age, Crutzen and coauthor Christian Schwägerl wrote in 2011: “It’s a pity we’re still officially living in an age called the Holocene. The Anthropocene—human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth—is already an undeniable reality.”

When the Anthropocene began is still an open question though—this quandary and attempt to identify its geological marker is what scientists refer to as locating the “Golden Spike.” Some say it started with the Industrial Revolution; others suggest it was the advent of nuclear energy, or even the invention of the steam engine. Whether or not the precise date can be determined is hardly the point, however. What increasingly matters is that human impact on the Earth has become so wildly out of control that it has tipped the planet’s balance past the point of its own ability to heal and regenerate, causing a sixth mass extinction. The works on view loosely divide along subthemes, which all relate to and demonstrate the behavior of this new human epoch and how it manifests in relation to the environment.

This section is part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.

This section showcases works that invite us to reflect on our interdependence on a multitude of animate and inanimate matter, including galaxies, insects, cephalopods, beavers, minerals, plant life, and forests. Posthuman philosophers, such as Rosi Braidotti, have been warning for decades about the perils of privileging human thought over other life forms. These theorists argue that the superimposition of reason, humanism, and the methodologies they have spawned has created the crises we struggle to overcome today, and that we have lost the capacity and ability to control their outcomes (AI, fossil fuel production, consumption, excess, waste, commerce, warfare, etc.). Instead, posthumanists propose the advancement of biodiversity, circularity, degrowth, resilience, nature, regeneration, inclusivity, and mutual coexistence. This necessarily requires displacing anthropocentrism as the ultimate paradigm against which all other concepts are weighed.

This section is a part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.

This section of the exhibition grounds the project and serves as the conceptual heart around which the other areas radiate. The myriad artworks on display underscore Indigenous ecological knowledge of diverse types, which have modeled care, respect, and protection of the land for millennia. Indeed, the understanding that life forms belong to and coexist with the natural world is a foundational aspect of Indigenous thought and precedes concepts of ecofeminism, environmentalism, and sustainability. Listening to and extending Indigenous ecological practice and experience is vital for the future well-being of life on Earth. As artist Rose B. Simpson has stated, “We are on a precipice right now, and everything we do will impact the land.” The exhibition endeavors to inspire audiences to envision that edge and carefully navigate away from it. Jeffrey Gibson’s mural The Land Is Speaking, Are You Listening? inspires the title of this section, which features over fifty First Nations artists from Australia, the United States, Canada, and South America.

This section is part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.

Strange Weather assembles works of art that represent the extreme climatic events taking place all around us. We live in a time distinguished by increasingly strange weather—a phenomenon atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe likens to “global weirding.” Similarly, environmental activist Greta Thunberg has written that “the weather seems to be on steroids, and natural disasters increasingly appear less and less natural.”

It’s hard to even quantify all the transformations we have witnessed in the last thirty years: megadroughts, melting ice caps, unabating wildfires, intense flooding, devastating hurricanes, stronger jet streams, warming oceans, heavier rainfall, dangerous bomb cyclones, rising sea levels, interminable heat waves, lethal tornadoes, and deadly storm surges. These are fueled by the greenhouse gases (such as CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide) we emit into the Earth’s atmosphere, speeding up the rate of change and amplifying the extremes.

This section is part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.

The Sixth Extinction identifies the precarious period we presently inhabit. Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book of the same name inspires the title. In her masterful opus, Kolbert charts Earth’s previous five mass extinctions—from the Ordovician-Silurian events, occurring about 444 million years ago and resulting in the loss of around 85 percent of marine life, to the Cretaceous-Paleogene event some 66 million years ago, precipitated by an asteroid hitting the planet’s surface near present-day Mexico. Approximately 75 percent of all species on Earth became extinct. Kolbert discusses these historical episodes to emphasize that recent destruction, driven by human activity, is causing a similar loss of biodiversity. Epic shifts in the climate—whether ice ages, global warming, or severe volcanic activity—define each mass extinction. Yet, none of the previous five events occurred as fast as the one we are currently experiencing. Extinction, however, is not an endgame humans need to rehearse. The cataclysm doesn’t have to be us—there is still time to avert the sixth extinction. The time horizon, though, is narrowing.

This section is part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.