Let me speculate that it all started in 1492, when Columbus landed on America, and the year when Reconquista was complete on the Iberian Peninsula. Sailing into the deep sea, like rocketing into the deep space, the Christian world took “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” by crossing the Atlantic Ocean. The gyre that carried Columbus to America and back, soon cycled the triangular trade of slaves, cottons, and textile. This powered the rise of the West, which now has come to determine and dominate the way of life for most of us on this planet, including other forms of life, animate or inanimate. 

What then empowered the Western colonial imperialism is now generating the great North Atlantic Garbage Patch, a floating island of plastic wastes several hundreds of kilometers wide. Setting off the globalizing chain of production, consumption, and waste, 1492 is the year when we became the slayer of the earth, no longer its caretaker. I say that this is the begin of Anthropocene, or the Climate Endgame. 

Higher population, higher production, and higher consumption are the “triad of progress.” In this consumption drive population explosion, it is nature that must be sacrificed to our “creative destruction” so that our prosperous life must continue.  The Idea of Progress is, therefore, the most spectacular power that the West has brought to the destruction of our planet. But can this be continued forever?  

Yes, we are told to recycle and reduce pollution and so on. But few are brave enough to stand up against the freedom of consumer’s choice, our most cherished form of democracy. We want to convert our cars into electric, but we are unwilling to make them smaller, buy less or not at all. Its patriotic to buy and waste. Afterall, we are not citizen anymore. We are now just than trekked consumers to further income inequality.

But such “con-sumptuous” happiness is not for everyone, because we are not all equal in this wonderful world of voodoo capitalism and autocracy. I fear that the Climate Endgame will continue to favor the dominant race, economy, and even geography, as we have seen recently in the “we were not all in this together” COVID-19. Many nations in the global south, along with other developing nations elsewhere, are conscripted to the front line of the storming environmental crisis. I wonder racism and inequality that are deeply rooted into our labor, land and capital, would react when the scarcity, not plenty, becomes the rule of our future.

After surviving the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) of the Cold War, are we about to enter the Self-Assured Destruction (SAD) of the Environmental War? In a race against time, Celsius, meters, NRR, TFR, PPM, PPT, MWh, KWh and most of all, percentages, now are the tarot cards of our destiny. These cuneiforms of data in our social and media spaces composing a grand illusion that the problems are all floating “out there,” when they are rather deeply embedded in our greedy culture of anthropocentric civilization that has refused to live equal with nature.

But are we capable of self-correcting to nature? Did the Idea of Progress that made us look only forward have completely disabled of our ability to reflect and be critical? Is the Era of Progress that proclaimed to control nature and destine our future coming to an end? If so, then who will then control our future in the future?

It will be history, but not of ours. History that we always thought was only about us, and written by us, wants to liberate itself away from us. Fearing its own extinction, like everything else that have encountered us, History now wants to be self-determinant, and no longer be just the necropolis of our “great deeds.” The ‘real’ Universal History, not Turgot’s liberalism, will be one that includes history of nature, a new Eco-Culture. 

So this is the premise of the project “2086:Together How?” which is currently exhibiting at the Korean Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. It wishes to interrogate our Faustian ideology of progress and how we have sought unlimited material pleasure through industrialization, colonization, and globalization. The exhibition asserts that not only the environmental crisis will force us to invent a better eco-cultural paradigm, it will be also be our best and perhaps our last chance to become a better humanity. “Together How?” is the question that will take us to the year when our global population is supposed to decline. But remember, the crisis is not in the environment. It is deep and long within us.