Eremocene

Robert Scott Thompson — 2020

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Avant-garde Classical, Electroacoustic/Acousmatic
Avant-garde Classical, Electroacoustic/Acousmatic
Avant-garde Classical, Electroacoustic/Acousmatic
Avant-garde Classical, Electroacoustic/Acousmatic
Craig Hultgren, 'cello
Avant-garde Classical, Electroacoustic/Acousmatic

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Eremocene (2020) — Robert Scott Thompson — Avant-garde Music

Thompson, like Robert Rich, has a distinctive knack for creating new sounds that don’t appear in nature or human-made instruments, including electronically (up to that point). So-called “field recordings” are a common (and IMJ, overused) element in ambient music, but here Thompson creates what amounts to his own, used in intriguing ways that sound familiar and mysterious at the same time. A seminal work from an artist already with his own distinguished voice. Favorite track: Of Loriot and Memory.

— Paul Ashbuy Seaman

E.O. Wilson, age 90, an “Alabamian who came up North to have work,” is the “world’s foremost authority on biodiversity.” Raised a Southern Baptist, Wilson is not a church goer, though a religious fervor comes in the form of his dedication to science, conservation, and protecting the planet and its inhabitants. As Caleb Johnson reports at The Bitter Southerner, Wilson believes that people have the power to stop climate change and avoid leaving the Anthropocene era for the Eremocene — the Age of Loneliness.

Wilson has argued that if we don’t soon change the way we live we will leave behind the Anthropocene and enter the Eremocene, or the Age of Loneliness, a term Wilson has popularized that defines an epoch marked by an existential and material isolation resulting from having extinguished so many other forms of life. To his point, a new study published in Nature suggests that mass extinction will look like a cliff rather than a slope as previously predicted. Ecosystem collapse in tropical oceans could begin as soon as next decade, followed by collapse in tropical forests — the most diverse ecosystems on the planet — in the 2040s. In other words, as Wilson writes, the biosphere will be reduced to “our domesticated plants and animals, and our croplands all around the world as far as the eye can see.

Scientists conceive of time differently than us layfolk. Millennia rather than days, centuries as opposed to minutes. E.O. Wilson is no exception. He assures me it isn’t too late to avoid an Age of Loneliness. He is also known for popularizing the term biophilia, or the innate pleasure we take in the presence of other organisms.

“We can confer immortality on the rest of life if we wish to do so,” he tells me. I leave feeling somewhat convinced, and I wonder what would happen if more people were imbued with a similar sense of possibility and responsibility toward our present environment.

— Krista Stevens