Life in the anthropocene; a cosmic drama: Exploring the human-nature relationship as a history of ideas in modern philosophical movements and its interpretation through an embodied experience in the Columbia River Basin

The Anthropocene is a recent designation for the current geological epoch in which Earth and its ecosystems are recognized as significantly altered by the culmination of human activities. It establishes the premise that human influence is now fully integrated into the world, reaching even the most remote recesses of wild nature. In short, it marks the anticipation of the planet as a reigning domain of humanity. As a historical frame of reference, the Anthropocene contains the inheritance of ideas from several philosophical movements that speak to the conflicts in the human--nature relationship. These ideas have competed over time within scholastic communities to define such characteristics as the holistic role of nature, the origins of wilderness, and the creative activities fostering humankind's productive ways of being. Deep ecology, the Romantic movement, and early modern empirical science are among the movements to inspire such definitions. Based on utopian and dystopian attitudes, their characterizations hinge on ideas that seek to redeem and restore the human condition from a dispirited state of nature or civilization.;The turmoil induced from the sense of alienation, pending apocalypse, and the hopes of overcoming it evokes a particular emotional energy from the ideas of each movement that can in turn help to characterize their positions. As archetypal forms, the character of these movements aid in mediating on a personal level the complexities one must grapple within the Anthropocene, which entails its own apocalyptic circumstances in the global environmental crisis. As a cultural and intellectual amalgamation of the Anthropocene, the philosophical movements that contain these character types serve to mitigate the internal crisis, namely one's displacement and separation from nature, which emerges with the ecological imbalance. Through a conscious and playful exchange with these characters of the Anthropocene, one can integrate its cultural inheritance. One can find in the embodiment of a personal narrative through emotional and philosophical agency the intimacy that is needed to discover, despite conflicting perspectives, one's whole sense of being. In such a personal engagement the prospects for further action is inspired.