Popular music is a generation-specific zeitgeist, while music affords otherwise unobtainable engagement with environmental themes. Despite being the most widespread form of music there is a paucity of scholarship on climate change vis-à-vis popular music. In turn, this article explores how popular music may provide a soundtrack that narrates the rapidity of contemporary biophysical change. Approaches of conveying versus communicating climate change in music are considered across a spectrum of musical forms, from contemporary and historical popular music to contemporary classical music and sound art. The article applies the framework of shifting baselines to music engaged with environmental change in order to formulate a closer relationship between objective and quantitative intergenerational biophysical change and subjective and qualitative socio-cultural change. To cease losing track of such inexorable degradation, the article speculates on future musical forms that may obviate such intergenerational myopia by conveying and/or communicating the unprecedented rapidity of biophysical change.

At the advent of the Anthropocene, life is being pushed to its limits the world over; we are currently living through the Sixth Mass Extinction to occur since multicellular life first emerged on the planet 570 million years ago. Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson sums up this push in the opening gambit of his book The Future of Life: “the race is now on between the techno-scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it”. Contra Wilson, this paper addresses the paradox arising from proposals to harness “techno-scientific forces … to save” the “living environment” while other forces continue to destroy it. By framing human-inflected evolution in an age of human-induced extinction, this article asks what could or should conservation become, if ‘conserving’ imperiled species might now require genetic interventions of the synthetic kind. Drawing upon recent key markers of “the race”, this paper presents a notional conservation for the Anthropocene—namely, that such a conservation proposes active intervention not only into ecosystems but into evolution itself. And yet, such interventions can only be considered in the context of the planetary scale that is the Anthropocene-writ-large, as per the desertification of the Amazon or the collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, the spatial scale of the microbial world, and on the temporal scale of evolution. Viewed within such a context, this paper presents technoscientific conservation as paradoxically being both vital and futile, as well as timely and too late.

What conservation could possibly become commensurate with the rates of human-induced biophysical change unfolding at the advent to the Sixth Extinction Event? Any such conservation would require time-critical interventions into both ecosystems and evolution itself, for these interventions would also require domains of risk and ethics that shatter normative understandings of conservation. Yet a line appears to have been drawn in the sand against such experimental conservation. Holding the line will retain conservation practices that are null and void against the extinction debt facing multitudes of species. Crossing the line would invoke scales of bioengineering that appear abhorrent to normative morality. This article explores the question of whether this line in the sand could, and should, be crossed through a detailed case study of current and proposed conservation for endangered Chelonia mydas sea turtles on Raine Island, a small coral cay on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Chelonia mydas and Raine Island are presented as synecdoche for conservation across diverse species across the world because turtles are among the most endangered of all reptiles and Raine Island is the largest and most important rookery in the world for this species. With such lines disappearing under the rising seas, the article contemplates the unthinkable questions that our current situation demands we ask, and perhaps even try to answer.

The late-twentieth-century art form Responsive Environments comprised interrelations between artist, artwork, and audience, wherein responsivity and responsibility to an other, be it the social and/or physical environment of the artwork, could be tangibly evoked. Currently, such self-other understanding has become existentially critical, as the ecological and climate crisis collide with a new dearth of understanding concerning human-ecology and human-human responsivities and responsibilities. This article considers how Responsive Environments offered a unique means for exploring responsivity and responsibility between artist, artwork, and audience, and considers what the debates it once evoked might contribute to self-other relations in an age of human-induced planetary rupture, as expressed in climate crisis and mass extinction.