Det verkar vara svårt för människan att upprätthålla en sund relation till naturen – mycket vill ha mer, och snart nog har vi förvandlat alla grisar till matindustrivaror och all urskog till virkesåkrar. I farten riskerar vi även att förlora respekten för varandra.

After visiting the exhibition Zorn: A Swedish Superstar at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, I was reminded of an earlier visit to the artist’s home in Mora. Zorn placed the lights in the dining room there directly above the rear end of the table, where he sat. This might very well have been mere chance, or for practical reasons, but in hindsight it reminds us that Zorn was well aware of being a superstar in the spotlight. As an artist however, Zorn managed perfectly well to shine on his own. This becomes clear during a visit to the exhibition.

The main aim of the article is to historicise the view from above, which is recurrent when the ecological crisis is being addressed within contemporary art and visual culture today. The view from above may be considered a reasonable way to picture environmentally harmful land use and its consequences. In many ways this is perfectly justifiable. However, it also contains a few, but essential, problematic traits. The view from above – of deforestation, opencast coal mining and extreme urbanisation – corresponds with an ideal viewing position established in around the mid-19th century. This viewing position responded, according to art historian Jonathan Crary, to a need for objective perception. It allowed the observer to become supposedly detached, objective and disembodied, yet it also created a distance that was both physical and mental. The starting point in the article is that this viewing position cannot be decoupled from an anthropocentric understanding of the world, through which man has been assigned hegemony over other beings and has become the measure of all things.

This ideal viewing position, however, was not the only one developed during the 19th century. In both art and literature, a multisensory experience of nature and its landscape was articulated, one which anchored people to – rather than separated them from – their surroundings. The examples discussed in the text – J.M.W. Turner’s increasing disassociation from the picturesque landscape; John Ruskin’s exhortations to visit alpine regions, observe geological detail, and viscerally experience the landscape; and Leslie Stephen’s phenomenological experiences of mountain landscapes and his ability to erase the boundary between the Self and the mountain – all testify to a multisensory experience of the surrounding natural world. With Ruskin and Stephen in particular, what emerges is an individual connected and at one with – rather than separated from – the surroundings. Thus, a non-anthropocentric, holistic worldview was fashioned, one which we have reason to re-actualise today.

Destruktiv markanvändning hotar inte bara djurliv och ekosystem, vår behandling av jorden har också skapat möjligheter för virus att överföras från naturliga värdar till oss människor. Om människan och marken handlar en angelägen och aktuell utställning på Göteborgs konsthall.

Kan en kultur präglad av kortsiktiga beslut lära sig att rikta tanken 100 000 år framåt? Klimatkrisen kräver, precis som det använda kärnbränsle som väntar på slut­förvaring, ett långsiktigt tänkande. I sin nya bok undersöker författaren Axel Andersson om vi kan förvandla gift till botemedel.